31 Dec
2022
31 Dec
'22
9:59 a.m.
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.