Re: Bourne Shell Port Available

joe_at_invalid.address
Date: 06/15/05 

Date: 15 Jun 2005 06:22:00 -0500

Gunnar.Ritter@pluto.uni-freiburg.de writes:

> joe@invalid.address wrote:
>
> > I guess I'm happy for you, but I spend most of my time on Solaris
> > boxes trying to avoid the Bourne shell.
>
> A free, system-independent Bourne shell is definitively useful for
> processing legacy scripts and for testing the portability of shell
> scripts. It is clearly not everybody's favorite for tasks beyond
> that.

There might be something you can do in Boune that you can't with ksh
or a POSIX shell but I'm not aware of it. I've never seen a Bourne
shell script that couldn't be run by ksh anyway.

> > The only thing I can think of good to say about it is that it's
> > not csh.
>
> Another good thing is that its behavior has been stable essentially
> since SVR3. It is certainly a limited scripting language, but it is
> at least a no-surprises scripting language since the experienced
> programmer has known its oddities for years. In contrast, many more
> modern shells are a moving target for the script programmer - not
> only despite the POSIX standard, but partially even because their
> obligation to the POSIX standard requires them to fix non-conforming
> behavior even though people previously might have relied on it.

There's something to that, but I don't consider it very significant. I
suspect that writing to Bourne shell syntax with bash or ksh or
whatever is as portable and stable as needed.

If it says #!/bin/sh at the top of the script, then I would still
assume a Bourne shell and code appropriately, but once you put
something else there, that kind of portability ceases to be an issue.

> > Or do you mean /usr/xpg4/bin/sh? That might be nice, but it's not
> > Bourne shell.
>
> I would have ported that one too, but it is unfortunately not part
> of the OpenSolaris source archive.

This is a bit off-topic and we can take it up in comp.unix.solaris if
you like, but did you have any trouble with the boot disk for Solaris
Express? The web page says that's a prerequisite for building the Open
Solaris source, but the boot disk hangs at the copyright prompt for
me.

Joe

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