[RFC] Future of "messages" targets

[David Johnson]

On Tuesday 13 September 2005 04:01 am, Nicolas Goutte wrote:

> (I know that Bash is not standard on non-Linux systems.)

It's not very standard on Linux systems either. Sure, you will have 
bash, but you can't be guaranteed that it's linked to /bin/sh. On some 
distros that's still a vanilla POSIX shell like ash.

A good rule of thumb is "if you don't need all the bells and whistles of 
bash, use sh instead." Since bash is POSIX compatible, you don't even 
need to abandon it, just change your shebang to #!/bin/sh and 
occasionally check your scripts with sh, ash, or ksh.

Anecdote. At work we have have a rather large and expensive realtime 
embedded product. The base operating system is LynxOS. When we decided 
to update the core LynxOS, EVERY bash script on the system broke! 
That's because the OS switched from bash 1 to bash 2. The sad part was 
that in the two months I spent fixing the system, I didn't find one 
broken script that required any bash extension.

</rant>

-- 
David Johnson
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