Re: <OK> [Groff] serious pdfroff problems

[Andreas Kahari]

On 18/06/05, Jörgen Grahn <address@hidden> wrote:
> On Thu Jun 16 09:04:08 2005, address@hidden wrote:
> ...
> > I also strongly recommend _against_ using  #!/bin/sh  as the first line of
> > shell scripts.  There is no shell called "sh" anymore.  It is always one of 
> > the
> > other shells and they are different enough that it has become unreasonable 
> > to
> > expect any given shell script to work with all of them.  For example, I just
> > discovered that  tcsh  does not understand  $(command) !
> 
> Many others have responded, but just to make one thing perfectly clear:
> /bin/sh can never be csh(1) or tcsh(1). Or at least, 99% of all shell
> scripts will break on such a system, making it unusable.
> 
> There are many incompatibilities among the shells that *can* be /bin/sh
> (ksh, pdksh, ash, bash, zsh ...) but at least they belong to the same
> family of languages. Csh and tcsh are a completely different track.

There is, of course, a standard for Unix shells.  It's part of the
Single Unix Specification, which may be viewed here:

http://www.unix.org/single_unix_specification/

The interesting section is, I suppose,  "Shell Command Language" in
the "Shell & Utilities" section.


-- 
Andreas Kahari

PGP: 1024D/C2E163CB