Comments on: Trapped in Bourne Shell http://www.hotaboutlinux.com/2009/02/trapped-in-bourne-shell/ For Those Who Like to Dig Deeper Thu, 02 Sep 2010 19:42:32 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 By: Dean http://www.hotaboutlinux.com/2009/02/trapped-in-bourne-shell/comment-page-1/#comment-1495 Dean Tue, 06 Jul 2010 03:32:31 +0000 http://www.hotaboutlinux.com/?p=7#comment-1495 This article is full of fallacies. It is confounding Bourne shell syntax (on which the modern POSIX shell dash is based) with implementation issues in the SVR4 shell. Using [ instead of [[ isn't a sin; [ is a builtin on dash too: it doesn't fork so the "compelling reason" in the article is moot. dash is faster than bash, so the argument about shell syntax versus builtins is redundant: if you wanted speed, you wouldn't use bash in the first place (look up BUGS in the bash manpage, bash is "too big and too slow"). The sentence about #!/bin/sh "still invoking bash" under busybox is either wrong or very poorly-worded. The Bourne shell syntax has been standardised in POSIX, portability is a good enough reason for making shell scripts POSIX-compatible. If lazy people stopped using bashisms then more linux distributions could follow Ubuntu and Debian's lead and have /bin/sh point to dash by default, making things faster for everybody. This article is full of fallacies. It is confounding Bourne shell syntax (on which the modern POSIX shell dash is based) with implementation issues in the SVR4 shell. Using [ instead of [[ isn’t a sin; [ is a builtin on dash too: it doesn’t fork so the “compelling reason” in the article is moot. dash is faster than bash, so the argument about shell syntax versus builtins is redundant: if you wanted speed, you wouldn’t use bash in the first place (look up BUGS in the bash manpage, bash is “too big and too slow”).

The sentence about #!/bin/sh “still invoking bash” under busybox is either wrong or very poorly-worded.

The Bourne shell syntax has been standardised in POSIX, portability is a good enough reason for making shell scripts POSIX-compatible. If lazy people stopped using bashisms then more linux distributions could follow Ubuntu and Debian’s lead and have /bin/sh point to dash by default, making things faster for everybody.

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