sh man page ....

[William A. Mahaffey III]

On 10/11/14 08:25, TonyMc wrote:
> On Fri, 10 Oct 2014 10:30:19 -0500
> "William A. Mahaffey III" <wam at hiwaay.net> wrote:
>
>>
>> I have a FBSD 9.3 desktop that supplanted a Linux FC14 desktop used
>> for web access, some light development, & other day-to-day tasks
>> (i.e. my daily driver, so to speak). I had a bunch of shell scripts
>> written to use Linux sh, which was in fact bash, which means it had a
>> superset of the arithmetic operators that traditional sh had. When I
>> use these scripts under sh under FBSD 9.3, they largely work, though
>> there are some minor differences (empty strings evaluate to zero (0)
>> under bash, error under sh). The man page for sh doesn't reflect some
>> of these compatibilities/incompatibilities, & is a bit short on its
>> description of arithmetic evaluations in general. It would be sweet
>> if it were updated to document more of the differences/similarities
>> w/ bash, since there a clearly a decent number of similarities, &
>> only a few (for me) differences. TIA ....
>>
> It seems to me you have this the wrong way around.  /bin/sh is the
> Bourne shell, bash is sh-like, so surely it is the task of the bash
> maintainers to document incompatibilities with the Bourne shell?  The
> "a" in bash is for "again", so it is clearly intended as a Bourne-shell
> inspired shell.  The example you give of silently evaluating empty
> strings as numeric zero is exactly the sort of incompatibility that
> should be documented in the bash man page.  But it is not the sh
> shell's problem, surely?
>
> Tony
>
>
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Logically perfect :-). I am only whining about the 'oversight' (my word) 
since I came in the other direction (bash 1st, under Linux, followed by 
sh under FBSD). I am making the suggestion from a purely logistical POV, 
since bash is pretty widespread, & people coming to FBSD from Linux may 
bring their bash scripts & such w/ them. It is by no means *any* 
impugnment of FBSD, merely a suggestion for the convenience of a more 
complete man page (which other, older UNICES (SGI, Convex) had). I think 
FBSD sh does in fact accomodate some bash-ism's, and simply embellishing 
the arithmetic & logical evaluation sections, w/ no mention of bash, 
would probably be helpful to many. I obviously touched a nerve here ;-), 
my bad, but I think my point, if correctly worded, remains valid .... 
Who knows ....

-- 

	William A. Mahaffey III

  ----------------------------------------------------------------------

	"The M1 Garand is without doubt the finest implement of war
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