Dangers of using a non-base shell

[James]

On Mon, 2007-10-29 at 20:50 +0000, Stephen Allen wrote:

> It's been drawn to my attention not to use bash from the ports 
> collection, because if one of it's dependencies (gettext or libiconv) 
> fails or is updated significantly, it could break, and prevent login. 
> The suggested solution was to use a base shell (such as sh) and append 
> 'bash -l' to .shrc to automatically enter bash.
> 
> The quite annoying side-effect is having to type 'exit' twice to get out 
> of a su shell or screen.
> 
> Would it be a better idea to use the pre-compiled binary for bash?  

No, as the same problem exists.

What you're looking for is a statically compiled binary. There have been
a few threads in the October about statically compiling bash.

If you look hard enough, you'll even find someone who claims that the
only shells for unix lovers are sh, csh, and tcsh. 

But I like bash's tab completion. No other shell implements it as well
that I've found.





> And 
> if I did so, could I be alerted to updates as easy as using 'pkg_version 
> -v' when checking if any ports need updating?
> 
> Many thanks,
> Steve
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