31 Dec
2022
31 Dec
'22
10:12 a.m.
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.
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.
There's some variants of the Almquist shell that have bash-style
command-line editing, and I can deal with that if that's /bin/sh. Usually
I use bash and it's plenty fine.
I generally code shell scripts for Posix sh as my baseline and start my
scripts with #!/bin/sh - but sometimes I'll use #!/bin/ksh if I don't
expect them to be used on another machine. ksh93 is lighter and faster
than bash and the only things I miss are quirks of the command line
editor.
-uso.