*BSD News Article 32177


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From: iiitac@uk.ac.swan.pyr (Alan Cox)
Subject: Re: Taylor UUCP on FreeBSD???
Message-ID: <1994Jun21.114816.7706@uk.ac.swan.pyr>
Organization: Swansea University College
References: <2u53jg$rrk@pdq.coe.montana.edu> <2u5bom$cb6@glitnir.ifi.uio.no> <2u5hnf$svv@pdq.coe.montana.edu>
Date: Tue, 21 Jun 1994 11:48:16 GMT
Lines: 25

In article <2u5hnf$svv@pdq.coe.montana.edu> nate@bsd.coe.montana.edu (Nate Williams) writes:
>>With all due respect, I suggest that you clean up your "default build
>>tools" so that they work with bash instead of tying your users to a
>>non-standard Bourne shell.
>
>ash is more standard than bash, and is MUCH (!!!) smaller.  Why use a
>swiss army knife when a pen-knife works just fine.  If you want to use
>bash as your login shell, so be it, but I'll kick and scream when you
>tell me that it has to be the shell used for programming and such.  I
>don't need command line editing, history and the like for simple scripts
>in the system.

I don't either but I've found I can't trust ash to get it right (I can't
always trust bash either for that matter, but it seems to cope better).

>And there was a big push a while back to replace bash with ash due
>to it's size.  Again, for an interactive shell bash is great, but
>for system performance it just doesn't stack up.

Theres still a good argument for cleaning up your build tools to work with
any decent Posix compliant shell. I still use ash compiled to use readline
on smaller machines, and use bash on them for scripts. If I was worried
about performance of my scripts I'd rewrite them in perl or C.

Alan