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

Paul Chvostek paul+fbsd at it.ca
Tue Jul 3 13:00:18 UTC 2007


On Mon, Jul 02, 2007 at 03:11:56PM -0500, Martin McCormick wrote:
> 
> #! /bin/sh
> a = 5
> 
> that's enough to make it happen. Run that, and you get:
> 
> a: not found
> 
> 	Interestingly enough, if you run that same script in a
> Debian Linux environment, you get:
> 
> ./testfile: line 2: a: command not found

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:

  [paul at ast1 ~]$ uname -s
  Linux
  [paul at ast1 ~]$ ls -l `which bash sh`
  -rwxr-xr-x  1 root root 616248 Aug 13  2006 /bin/bash
  lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root      4 Mar 25 20:36 /bin/sh -> bash


-- 
  Paul Chvostek                                             <paul at it.ca>



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