On Fri, 2004-05-28 at 17:34, Roger Merchberger wrote:
Rumor has it that Jules Richardson may have mentioned
these words:
It works in sh on this linux machine, but
that's perhaps a long way from the original sh (as I believe it's just
bash running in sh compatibility mode).
Huh? AFAIK, bash is *always* in "sh compatibility mode" as it's (supposed
to be) backward-compatible with sh. If you:
ls -lAF /bin|grep sh
you'll prolly see that sh is just a symlink to bash, so you're running
full-blown bash.
Sure - but I meant that just because I tried doing the ^a^b command
modification thingy in sh (which as you say is a link to bash) on the
machine I'm sitting in front of (as with you, RH9), that doesn't
necessarily mean that it's available in the original sh, as it could be
a feature of another shell which bash has incorporated over time.
Actually, I just looked at the man page for bash, which says:
"If bash is invoked with the name sh, it tries to mimic the startup
behavior of historical versions of sh as closely as possible, while
conforming to the POSIX standard as well"
... which maybe does imply that bash isn't *quite* as sh compatible when
run as bash rather than sh. Of course that just mentions the startup
behaviour, not whether there are differences during normal interactive
operation.
Which makes me realise that I may well still have an old version of the
SLS distribution of Linux somewhere, which is actually on topic as it's
over ten years old now. :)
cheers
Jules