Date: Sat, 11 Oct 2014 10:06:29 -0500 From: "William A. Mahaffey III" <wam@hiwaay.net> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: sh man page .... Message-ID: <54394775.9020303@hiwaay.net> In-Reply-To: <20141011142538.45c9f45a@elena.home> References: <5437FB8B.9080008@hiwaay.net> <20141011142538.45c9f45a@elena.home>
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On 10/11/14 08:25, TonyMc wrote: > On Fri, 10 Oct 2014 10:30:19 -0500 > "William A. Mahaffey III" <wam@hiwaay.net> wrote: > >> >> I have a FBSD 9.3 desktop that supplanted a Linux FC14 desktop used >> for web access, some light development, & other day-to-day tasks >> (i.e. my daily driver, so to speak). I had a bunch of shell scripts >> written to use Linux sh, which was in fact bash, which means it had a >> superset of the arithmetic operators that traditional sh had. When I >> use these scripts under sh under FBSD 9.3, they largely work, though >> there are some minor differences (empty strings evaluate to zero (0) >> under bash, error under sh). The man page for sh doesn't reflect some >> of these compatibilities/incompatibilities, & is a bit short on its >> description of arithmetic evaluations in general. It would be sweet >> if it were updated to document more of the differences/similarities >> w/ bash, since there a clearly a decent number of similarities, & >> only a few (for me) differences. TIA .... >> > It seems to me you have this the wrong way around. /bin/sh is the > Bourne shell, bash is sh-like, so surely it is the task of the bash > maintainers to document incompatibilities with the Bourne shell? The > "a" in bash is for "again", so it is clearly intended as a Bourne-shell > inspired shell. The example you give of silently evaluating empty > strings as numeric zero is exactly the sort of incompatibility that > should be documented in the bash man page. But it is not the sh > shell's problem, surely? > > Tony > > > _______________________________________________ > freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list > http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions > To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-questions-unsubscribe@freebsd.org" > Logically perfect :-). I am only whining about the 'oversight' (my word) since I came in the other direction (bash 1st, under Linux, followed by sh under FBSD). I am making the suggestion from a purely logistical POV, since bash is pretty widespread, & people coming to FBSD from Linux may bring their bash scripts & such w/ them. It is by no means *any* impugnment of FBSD, merely a suggestion for the convenience of a more complete man page (which other, older UNICES (SGI, Convex) had). I think FBSD sh does in fact accomodate some bash-ism's, and simply embellishing the arithmetic & logical evaluation sections, w/ no mention of bash, would probably be helpful to many. I obviously touched a nerve here ;-), my bad, but I think my point, if correctly worded, remains valid .... Who knows .... -- William A. Mahaffey III ---------------------------------------------------------------------- "The M1 Garand is without doubt the finest implement of war ever devised by man." -- Gen. George S. Patton Jr.
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