[TUHS] A few comments on porting the Bourne shell

[Larry McVoy]

On Fri, Dec 30, 2022 at 05:08:42PM -0700, Luther Johnson wrote:
> I use csh (tcsh) and bash at the command line, but straight Bourne shell
> language is preferred and recommended by many for shell programming, I used
> to use csh for that and got bitten by all the things that I later
> discovered, those in the know had been warning about for years. Also,
> "bash-isms", syntactic sugary things in bash had led me to use them as a
> crutch, my scripts got simpler and more to the point when I re-wrote them
> for Bourne shell language only. That was my experience. I think we'll always
> have some kind of Bourne shell as the script workhorse, at last in
> Linux/Unix start-up and other blood and guts stuff.

When I was running my engineering team I was strict about Bourne syntax
and features only.  I got pushed on like crazy because "bash has this
$GOODNESS whhhhhhhy can't we use it".  Because we were supporting our
product on pretty much every unix and if it wasn't HP-UX that had an
ancient /bin/sh, it was AIX or whoever. 

Over and over, I won the "straight bourne shell only" battle.  So I agree,
if you want /bin/sh to work, Bourne shell for the win.

For a login shell, bash is my shell of choice.  It's bloated but I'm
typing this on a 5 year old Lenova X1 Carbon with 16GB of memory and
4 cores and it's fine.  It was fine a 133mhz Pentium.