Re: [Groff] a calling interface for shell scripts in groff

[Colin Watson]

On Sun, Jul 14, 2002 at 05:35:55PM +0200, Bernd Warken wrote:
> On Sun, Jul 14, 2002 at 12:01:36PM +0100, Ralph Corderoy wrote:
> > Besides, the ash man page suggests it's POSIX plus a few Berkeley
> > extensions.
> 
> The documentation is quite wrong at some places.  My experience is
> that a shell script that runs with `ash' will run on any Bourne type
> of shell.

Sure. That's an excellent argument for testing your own scripts using it
(perhaps symlinking /bin/sh to ash locally, if your OS supports that),
but less so for having everyone else use it.

There are other shells which are small, fast, and compatible - pdksh
comes to mind - and I don't think there's any particular reason to treat
ash specially. Good shell scripts should allow the sysadmin to use
whichever he/she chooses, and the simplest way to do that is to trust
that /bin/sh will be whatever's locally considered best.

-- 
Colin Watson                                  address@hidden