I have to support many platforms with these shell scripts. In addition to commercial variants of *NIX (Solaris, HP-UX, AIX) there are specific versions (distrobutions) of Linux that need to be supported.
One such distrobution is Red Hat 6.1. The bash that comes with that distro is version 1.14.7
Using that version, I inconsistantly stumble upon the "Can't reopen pipe to command substitution" bu g - which has to do with bash 1.x not being signal safe (SIGCHLD in this case).
Of course bugs will crop up in any software, but as the size and features of any piece of software grows, we can expect to see more bugs with each feature. This is fine if you need the features that bash provide (which, i agree, are very nice). But if you are merely looking for stable Bourne shell compatibility, perhaps an alternative shell would be better suited for the task. I havent run exhaustive tests on ash, and im not sure its general deployment stature, but i know that ksh (pdksh) is not shipped in the base install for many linux distros.
Its really a question of direction at this point. If the bash team are working on making a better interactive shell, and doing well i might add, then perhaps there arises a need for a simple POSIX Bourne shell. Writing to any shell other than #!/bin/sh is a bad idea for anything thats trying to be the lowest common denominator.
I could write it in Perl, i could write it in C . insert your favorite language of choice here, but thats not the point.
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I have to support many platforms with these shell scripts. In addition to commercial variants of *NIX (Solaris, HP-UX, AIX) there are specific versions (distrobutions) of Linux that need to be supported.
One such distrobution is Red Hat 6.1. The bash that comes with that distro is version 1.14.7
Using that version, I inconsistantly stumble upon the "Can't reopen pipe to command substitution" bu g - which has to do with bash 1.x not being signal safe (SIGCHLD in this case).
Of course bugs will crop up in any software, but as the size and features of any piece of software grows, we can expect to see more bugs with each feature. This is fine if you need the features that bash provide (which, i agree, are very nice). But if you are merely looking for stable Bourne shell compatibility, perhaps an alternative shell would be better suited for the task. I havent run exhaustive tests on ash, and im not sure its general deployment stature, but i know that ksh (pdksh) is not shipped in the base install for many linux distros.
Its really a question of direction at this point. If the bash team are working on making a better interactive shell, and doing well i might add, then perhaps there arises a need for a simple POSIX Bourne shell. Writing to any shell other than #!/bin/sh is a bad idea for anything thats trying to be the lowest common denominator.
I could write it in Perl, i could write it in C . insert your favorite language of choice here, but thats not the point.