Jan Engelhardt <jengelh@inai.de> wrote:
The real requirement is that the "sh" command, when invoked, provides a shell that behaves like POSIX sh. bash seems to largely fulfill that role, but you can also override it point to dash - another implementation of a POSIX sh - instead. (But some additional measures would be needed to make that permanent.)
The problem with using bash is that bash implements many ksh-isms that encourage people to write non-portable scripts. Another problem is that bash is one of the slowest shell implementations ever. The problem with dash is that it does not implement support for multi byte characters and thus would not permit a platform that uses dash as system shell to become POSIX certified for more that "embedded use". BTW: If someone did add multi-byte support to dash, dash would become even slower than bash. So selecting dash for performance reasons may become a bad idea in the future. If you are interestet, you may like to try out the most recent Bourne Shell (bosh). It is not yet (*) as fast as ksh93, but faster than dash and bosh implements multi-byte support. To make it behave as expected on Linux, it is recommended to be compiled with: smake 'CPPOPTX=-DPOSIX_BOSH_PATH=\"/bin/sh\"' in order to enforce "set -o posix" for /bin/sh. bosh has been successfully tested on Gentoo Linux and OpenSolaris. It replaced ksh93 as the system shell on SchilliX this summer. *) There is a planned rewrite for the "field separation" code that would make it 5-10% faster than ksh93. http://schilytools.sourceforge.net/bosh.html Jörg -- EMail:joerg@schily.net (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin joerg.schilling@fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/ URL: http://cdrecord.org/private/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/schilytools/files/' -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-factory+owner@opensuse.org