*BSD News Article 60574


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From: "Faried Nawaz" <fn@uidaho.edu>
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: /bin/sh isn't Bourne shell
Date: 02 Feb 1996 18:09:48 -0800
Organization: People's Front Against WWW
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In article <4eo70i$o7j@eccles.dsbc.icl.co.uk> ejr@dickens.bra01.icl.co.uk (Ed Randall) writes:

$ 'Scuse my ignorance, but who or what is "CSRG" ?

computer science research group?  not sure.
they managed and put together the bsd releases in uc berkeley.


$ Er, that's very nice and kind of you "purists", but no thanks.

no, you don't understand.  the "purist" argument is what you are proposing;
that /bin/sh should act like the old svr3 bourne shell; the "standards"
argument is that it should comply w posix.


$ Is this a case of "the standards are more important than the installed base"
$ where in this case, the installed base is any shell script with "#!/bin/sh" at
$ the top, where "/bin/sh" means Bourne shell, and includes your very own 
$ "MAKEDEV" script, distributed with the aforementioned 2.1.0-R ?

since new installations are moving towards posix...


$ Maybe that's why HP ships a POSIX-compliant shell as /bin/posix-sh (or 
$ something similar, can't remember the exact name)  and leaves /bin/sh as 
$ good ole' Bourne shell.

actually, no more:

; telnet harrier
Trying 129.101.119.230...
Connected to harrier.csrv.uidaho.edu.
Escape character is '^]'.

HP-UX harrier B.10.01 A 9000/819 (ttyqe)

login: fn
Password:
Please wait...checking for disk quotas
-------------------------------------------------------------
Hi.  Welcome to Harrier.
-------------------------------------------------------------
QOTD:
    There is no practical reason to create machine
    intelligences indistinguishable from human ones.
    People are in plentiful supply.  Should a shortage
    arise, there are proven and popular methods of making
    more.  The point of using machines ought to be they
    perform differently than people, and preferably better.
                          -- The Economist
                                          -- qotd@uidaho.edu
-------------------------------------------------------------
$ echo $0
-sh
$ ls -li /bin/sh /usr/bin/sh
  4061 -r-xr-xr-x   2 bin      bin       405504 Jun 12  1995 /bin/sh
  4061 -r-xr-xr-x   2 bin      bin       405504 Jun 12  1995 /usr/bin/sh
$ alias foo=bar
$ foo
sh: bar:  not found.
$ exit
logout
Connection closed by foreign host.
[status 1]
;


faried.