[TUHS] A few comments on porting the Bourne shell

Chet Ramey chet.ramey at case.edu
Sat Dec 31 06:47:02 AEST 2022


On 12/30/22 3:02 PM, Larry McVoy wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 30, 2022 at 02:51:26PM -0500, Chet Ramey wrote:
>> On 12/30/22 1:25 PM, Paul Ruizendaal wrote:
>>>
>>> London and Reiser report about porting the shell that ???it required by far the largest conversion effort of any supposedly portable program, for the simple reason that it is not portable.??? By the time of SysIII this is greatly improved, but also in porting the SysIII user land it was the most complex of the set so far.
>>
>> Have you read
>>
>> http://www.collyer.net/who/geoff/sh.tour.pdf
>>
>> and looked at http://www.collyer.net/who/geoff/v7sh.tar ?
>>
>> In the limited literature on Bourne Shell porting, this is authoritative.
> 
> Is there are reason to hang on to the Bourne shell?  Maybe shell scripts?
> Does it perform better than ksh or bash?

Historical interest? Software archaeology? Reference behavior?

I don't think anyone is suggesting that we use it as a login shell, in the
same way that no one is suggesting we go back to using v7 as an everyday
computing environment. The world's come too far.

-- 
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
		 ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU    chet at case.edu    http://tiswww.cwru.edu/~chet/



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