On Fri, Jan 26, 2007, Joerg Pernfuss wrote: >On Fri, 26 Jan 2007 15:21:14 +0100 >Karol Kwiatkowski <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >> > While that's true for most shells, bash, csh, tcsh, etc., it >> > doesn't work on true Bourne /bin/sh shells (e.g. SCO OpenServer >> > 5.0.6a and earlier and probably others with Bell Labs ancestors). >> >> Not sure what I'm missing, is FreeBSD's /bin/sh shell not "true" >> Bourne Shell? Was it extended in some way from traditional one? > >FreeBSD /bin/sh is actually an ash, which roughly translates into >a POSIX shell with a few additions that do not break compatibility. >At least that is how I understood it.
My point isn't whether the FreeBSD /bin/sh expands it, but that not all systems are FreeBSD, and that one can have problems on other *NIX systems. Knowing where there may be differences, and avoiding the assumptions that a program behaves the same on all systems, can help writing code that's portable without surprises. One of the major reasons I have been using GNU utilities on Unix systems for twenty-plus years, built with the ``g'' prefix, is to have a common set of programs which behave the same regardless of platform. Stallman would probably say I ran GNU/Xenix, GNU/SunOS, GNU/OpenServer, etc. Bill -- INTERNET: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Bill Campbell; Celestial Software LLC URL: http://www.celestial.com/ PO Box 820; 6641 E. Mercer Way FAX: (206) 232-9186 Mercer Island, WA 98040-0820; (206) 236-1676 ``Most people, sometime in their lives, stumble across truth. Most jump up, brush themselves off, and hurry on about their business as if nothing had happened.'' - Sir Winston Churchill _______________________________________________ [email protected] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"
