Date: Tue, 30 Oct 2007 13:02:06 +0000 From: "Benjamin M. A'Lee" <bma+lists@subvert.org.uk> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Dangers of using a non-base shell Message-ID: <20071030130206.GB1178@gilmour.subvert.org.uk> In-Reply-To: <472647A0.3030009@brookes.ac.uk> References: <472647A0.3030009@brookes.ac.uk>
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On Mon, Oct 29, 2007 at 08:50:40PM +0000, Stephen Allen wrote: > It's been drawn to my attention not to use bash from the ports collection, > because if one of it's dependencies (gettext or libiconv) fails or is > updated significantly, it could break, and prevent login. The suggested > solution was to use a base shell (such as sh) and append 'bash -l' to .shrc > to automatically enter bash. > > The quite annoying side-effect is having to type 'exit' twice to get out of > a su shell or screen. > > Would it be a better idea to use the pre-compiled binary for bash? And if > I did so, could I be alerted to updates as easy as using 'pkg_version -v' > when checking if any ports need updating? With some of the shells there's the option to compile them statically, which would avoid the problem. You could possibly also put "bash -l && exit" in your .shrc, which would exit if bash exited successfully. I haven't tested it, but it should work. A precompiled binary wouldn't help, AFAIK, because you still wouldn't be able to use it if there was a problem with one of the libraries.
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