Hello, On Fri 18 Apr 2025 at 08:18am -04, Michael Stone wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 18, 2025 at 02:52:17PM +0800, Sean Whitton wrote: >>On Thu 17 Apr 2025 at 08:02pm -05, Richard Laager wrote: >>> So, personally, I think getting mktemp(1) added to POSIX would be >>> better for portability in the long run anyway. >> >>Eventually. POSIX.1-2017 is going to be the thing to target for a long >>time, I think. > > I think POSIX is mostly a relic, and not worth worrying about except as one of > many inputs. Too many mistakes were made too early on, and it's just too late > to get everyone to agree on a common standard because real world > implementations diverged in too many ways. If someone wants to make a program > that works reliably across platforms sh isn't the right tool in 2025. (And I > say that as someone who quotes POSIX regularly: it has value for things like > choosing amongst a set of possible implementations, but not for making > assumptions about what will work in the real world.) I have interpreted scripts that I want to run on any FreeBSD and Debian machine, because they are part of my OS bootstrapping. What else is there than POSIX sh for this? Therefore, it's still relevant. > I'm curious what modern platform doesn't have mktemp; is this more than an > academic question? I don't know. There are other things that you want awk for if you are doing pure POSIX sh scripting; mkstemp is just an example. -- Sean Whitton
