I'm not trying to write scripts that rely on the value of BASH. I only discoverd the discrepancy while investigating the potential usefulness of various variables set by the shell. Perhaps I just don't get the point of having the variable in the first place.
Also I'm not very fond of Ubuntu's pointing /bin/sh to dash rather than bash. That seems sacrilegious, in my opinion. David Hunt On 2/9/16, Chet Ramey <chet.ra...@case.edu> wrote: > On 2/8/16 7:09 PM, David Hunt wrote: > >> Bash Version: 4.3 >> Patch Level: 11 >> Release Status: release >> >> Description: >> On my notebook running Ubuntu 14.04.3 LTS /bin/sh points to dash, not >> bash. >> To get sh behaviour from bash I use the command `exec -a sh /bin/bash'. >> When I do so bash sets BASH to /bin/sh, which it demonstrably is not. > > Bash sets the BASH variable from $0. If $0 is a full pathname, it's used > directly, otherwise it's looked up in $PATH. That algorithm is not > foolproof, and one way to fool it is to disguise the program name. > > -- > ``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer > ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates > Chet Ramey, ITS, CWRU c...@case.edu http://cnswww.cns.cwru.edu/~chet/ >
