Danek Duvall wrote: > > I vote for changing the default shell to a better > one. > > Ah, but then the question is, which one. You might > choose ksh over bash > for various reasons, others might prefer tcsh, and > some of us know that zsh > is the One True Shell. If nothing else, the bourne > shell is one we can all > agree isn't something we want to use for very long. > ;-)
So far the discussion has revolved around what /bin/sh should be for purposes of system administration. This isn't very interesting to me since it is not difficult to change the root shell. What I do find annoying is when Makefiles and other scripts written in the Linux world are written using bash-specific syntax and break when run with /bin/sh, so I ended up changing /bin/sh to link to /bin/bash for that reason alone (after all, system() is hard-coded to use "/bin/sh" or perhaps "/usr/xpg4/bin/sh" if some magic flags are enabled). While you may argue that Linux developers are at fault for using bash-specific features in their scripts, it's like swimming against the tide since there are a lot more Linux users than Solaris users writing open-source code who have no idea that there is a subset of "/bin/sh" functionality that is considered "not portable" since for them, /bin/sh *is* /bin/bash. Another symlink that we might discuss changing is /usr/bin/tar to point to /usr/sfw/bin/gtar instead of /usr/sbin/tar. The main feature of GNU tar not present in Solaris tar is built-in support for .tar.gz and .tar.bz2 archives using the -z and -j flags, but I believe Solaris tar also has difficulty extracting archives with long pathnames created by GNU tar. Then again, with practice it's not *too* difficult to get used to typing gtar all the time, and I couldn't guarantee that changing /usr/bin/tar would be 100% safe from the POV of standards compliance and passing testsuites, or if there are customers whose scripts depend on the current behavior of /usr/bin/tar. -- Jake This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
