The worst error message in history belongs to... BIND9!

[Tom Evans]

On Tue, 2007-07-03 at 09:36 -0700, Bill Campbell wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 03, 2007, Martin McCormick wrote:
> >Paul Chvostek writes:
> >> This is actually just the difference between sh and bash.  You'll see
> >> the latter error if you type `a = 5` in bash in any OS.  It just so
> >> happens that most Linux distributions don't have a real sh:
> >
> >	I kind of thought that was the real issue. While
> >something like this is maybe slightly annoying at times, the
> >differences in, say, arithmetic handling and loops can sometimes
> >mean rewriting parts of shell scripts depending on whether it is
> >going to run in BSD or Linux.
> 
> That's a major argument for doing things in python or perl as
> they are consistent across all platforms.  While perl has a well
> deserved reputation for looking like modem noise, it's certainly
> no worse than shell scripts.
> 
> Pure /bin/sh is very limited in its constructs compared to other
> shells such as ksh, bash, etc.
> 
> Bill
> --
> INTERNET:   bill at Celestial.COM  Bill Campbell; Celestial Software LLC
> URL: http://www.celestial.com/  PO Box 820; 6641 E. Mercer Way
> FAX:            (206) 232-9186  Mercer Island, WA 98040-0820; (206) 236-1676
> 
> Marijuana will be legal some day, because the many law students
> who now smoke pot will someday become congressmen and legalize
> it in order to protect themselves.
> 		-- Lenny Bruce

sh should always be sh compatible on every platform (surprisingly). It
may even be defined in one of the POSIX standards. This is why you write
shell scripts in sh, even if you prefer csh, ksh or bash as your actual
shell.

Tom
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