Rick Troth wrote:
Let's avoid a religeous debate over shells.
Why shouldn't he learn Bash? All the Linux init scripts are in Bash,
the %pre and %post scripts in RPMs are in Bash, and lots of other system
management scripts are in Bash, so it seems like it makes more sense to
learn Bash.
This is a Linux discussion, so if we stay within Linux, fine,
let's code for BASH.
But not all systems have BASH, and on many which do have it
"/bin/sh" is not BASH but some other shell. So if the scripts
are to be at all portable beyond Linux, avoid BASH-isms.
Working for an ISV, I cannot recount the pain encountered
where KSH was assumed to be universal. Both Solaris and HP have it,
perhaps AIX too (or a work-alike). But along comes Linux where
"/bin/sh" is not KSH (but is BASH! oh my!) and scripts with
K-shell dependency are immediately broken. And there are
other platforms where neither KSH nor BASH are available
(or are optional, and we do not want to burden the customer
with pre-req upon pre-req).
The cases you cite are all Linux
or might reasonaly assume Linux even where Linux is not explicit.
and it's a fair bet that most people here will only ever code for Linux,
and further, that most scripts written for Linux maintenance have
limited scope for use outside Linux.
ISV folk, of course, may have different needs, but those are hardly the
most common.
The only proprietary Unix I've used is OS X, and that has bash. Many of
the programs are different though, including ls, top, ps and those will
cause more grief than whether one writes for sh or bash.
As someone here observed some time ago, explicity writing bash scripts
has the benefit of producing an immediate failure when bash isn't
available. Start you scripts
#!/bin/bash
by all means.
--
Cheers
John
-- spambait
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