["Followup-To:" header set to comp.unix.shell.] On 29 Nov 2008 16:23:49 GMT, Tam Ha <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Jorgen Grahn <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >>(I could get away with using Bash in these cases. It has functions, >>local variables and so on. Writing portable Bourne shell is not as >>much fun.) > > Can you explain this?
Sorry for the late answer. No, it's actually what I said: I could get away with using bash in these cases, so I did it. It was an in-house application, it had already unknown dependencies to bash, and to Linux versions of other utilities. If I had asked for time to modify it to make sure it was portable Bourne shell, people would have laughed at me. > Bourne is always more portable than Bash. > That's why you'll find experienced shell programmers writing everything > that doesn't absolutely require a bash feature in /bin/sh. Boot scripts, > install scripts, etc. should never be written in bash and if where you > find one using bash you can be sure a Linux-only newbie has written it. Sure, nothing controversial about that. I don't argue that people should use bash features in any random script they write. I just noted that if you decide to use it, it's a pretty useful language. Probably more useful than Python in my case, where most of the work was about starting and managing external commands and pipelines. > For one there are too many versions of bash, for two it is not installed > by default on every Unix/Linux OS, for three it has poor backwards > (and forwards) compatibility. Worse compatibility than Perl or Python? The Bourne shell timescale is probably impressive, but often you aren't interested in decades. > It is also found at different places on > the path. Surely that applies to almost any interpreter, like perl and python. It's a problem (on the non-free Unixes at least) but if you let it be the deciding factor, you could use no scripting language except /bin/sh and awk. /Jorgen -- // Jorgen Grahn <grahn@ Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu \X/ snipabacken.se> R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn! -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
