Re: shells present on an LSB system

[Andrew Josey <ajosey@rdg.opengroup.org>]

hi All
This started as a simple question:-)

I think that its not unreasonable
to consider backwards compatibility first, after all its usually
the end users who scream the loudest.

POSIX.2 requires that the shell be called sh, however it does not
specify a location, thus a /usr/posixbin/sh would be acceptable.

I have done a brief  not very scientific survey of the systems out
there to see who's doing what (these are all UNIX98 or 95 registered products)

Solaris 7 (UNIX 98), looks like /bin/sh is the System V shell (aka XPG3 sh)
note the conformant sh is in /usr/xpg4/bin/sh

$ ls -al /bin/sh /bin/ksh
-r-xr-xr-x   2 bin      bin       192764 Oct  6 08:42 /bin/ksh*
-r-xr-xr-x   3 bin      root       91668 Oct  6 08:46 /bin/sh*
$ls -l /usr/xpg4/bin/sh
lrwxrwxrwx   1 root     root          13 Nov  3 15:19 /usr/xpg4/bin/sh ->
../../bin/ksh

Solaris 2.6 (UNIX 95) does it the same way.

On AIX 4.3.1 (UNIX 98) it looks as if they have gone with the standard
POSIX.2 shell as /bin/sh
ls -al /bin/sh /bin/ksh
-r-xr-xr-x   4 bin      bin       240042 Mar 22 1998  /bin/ksh
-r-xr-xr-x   4 bin      bin       240042 Mar 22 1998  /bin/sh

On UnixWare 2.1.2 (UNIX 95) they still have the old shell as /bin/sh (i think
they have changed things in UnixWare 7 but I have not tried it out
yet).
$ ls -l /bin/sh /bin/ksh /u95/bin/sh
-r-xr-xr-x    1 bin      bin       135820 Feb 10  1997 /bin/ksh
-r-xr-xr-x    5 root     sys        74104 Feb 17  1997 /bin/sh
-r-xr-xr-x    2 bin      bin       414816 Feb  6  1997 /u95/bin/sh
$


regards
Andrew