On Apr 3, 2007, at 6:46 PM, Kielek, Samuel wrote:
I guess all I was trying to indirectly point out was that this
behaviour
is caused by the fact that Solaris has the heirloom Bourne shell as
/bin/sh (which existed prior to POSIX.2). By the way, the XPG version
(/usr/xpg4/bin/sh) on Solaris does support $().
I do agree and wonder why at this point Sun doesn't either update
it or
move it out of the way (I'm sure some customers still need/want it)
and
put a POSIX.2 compliant shell in its place (bash?).
Or, you know, even the XPG4 one. I mean, really, it's not 1986
anymore (XPG4 would get us all the way to 1988!), and surely you can
stick #!/usr/crusty/bin/sh on your shell scripts that really, really
depend on something that's actually *different* in POSIX (which isn't
much that I'm aware of). I like knowing that I have $() and semi-
sane arithmetic with $(()). If I'm actually using bash-isms,
requiring me to use /bin/bash is fine. But I think that in 2007 I
really, really ought to be able to assume the 2001 POSIX standard
will be implemented by the default shell found in /bin/sh.
I understand that Solaris must go to some lengths to remain bug-
compatible with its former self. But I had naively expected that
things had gotten better since Solaris 2.5 when all the useful stuff
was in /usr/ucb/bin.
Now it's just in xpg4 or, more often. sfw.
I think I've been thoroughly spoiled by GNU userland. I found myself
installing tons of stuff from sunfreeware.com (yes, the same sfw) in
order to get anything actually *done*. I've gotten used to little
things, like --owner 0 --group 0 in tar (a GNU tar extension) to let
me make owned-by-root tarballs for distribution without having to
build them as root. I strongly suspect that NexentaOS might be the
best thing ever: Solaris kernel, Debian userland. I haven't been
successful in installing it under Parallels yet though.
Adam
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