>Yes, availability wasn't my point. Ubiquity (with out considerable
>effort) was. If I write my shell in a portable manner ONCE then that
>scales far better than yours which demands GNU tools to be installed for
>every additional box you wish to roll it out to. I think my way will be
>less effort and time in the long run.
There is no single right answer. I avoid bashisms in my shell scripts,
but I wouldn't go to the extent of rewriting my Perl scripts in basic
sh. Some Unix environments are very basic, would you like to tangle with
SysV Xenix for example? Unfortunately porting tools isn't always the
answer either, you may run into difficulties building it. E.g. I know I
had to jump hoops to cram TeX into Tandy16 Xenix.
Someday we'll all run POSIX. Not holding my breath.
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