[TUHS] A few comments on porting the Bourne shell

Dave Horsfall dave at horsfall.org
Sat Dec 31 14:23:03 AEST 2022


On Fri, 30 Dec 2022, Larry McVoy wrote:

> 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.

I've never bothered to learn those Bash thingies, because "expr" does 
everything that I need and is available on just about all boxes.

> 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.

Yep; whoever wrote CSH must've been high on something, as the syntax makes 
no sense whatsoever.

> 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.

I do admit to being a bit of a ZSH user...  I've never bothered to learn 
all its features, but the subset I use gets me through.

-- Dave


More information about the TUHS mailing list