[Discuss] tcsh, AD, and RHEL 5.6

[Jerry Feldman]

On 09/08/2012 07:10 AM, Dan Ritter wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 07, 2012 at 06:18:25PM -0500, Derek Martin wrote:
>> rare these days that Unix systems ship with /bin/sh = the original
>> Bourne shell.  So, set their shell to /bin/sh, and make sure that is
>> bash on your linux systems, and everything should be hunky-dory.  I
>> know debian uses dash by default now, but in almost 20 years of
>> managing Linux systems, I've always used bash as the system shell,
>> even on production servers, and it's never caused a problem.  Though,
>> if the RC scripts are specifically written with dashisms, that could
>> be problematic.  This is one of the many reasons I don't like debian.
>> If your system is hosed, you're probably going to boot from a rescue
>> disk anyway...
> Debian changed to dash in large part to make sure that there
> weren't bashisms in the RC scripts. (There were. They got
> fixed.) The other reasons were to reduce required dependencies
> and decrease boot times.
>
> Having bash as the system shell rarely causes problems. Having
> scripts that need bash but don't declare it explicitly is the
> problem.
Systems scripts should definitely be Bourne, and while there have been
several versions of Bourne Shell over the years, the scripts should
always be written for Bourne and for the most part not depend on additions.

-- 
Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
Boston Linux and Unix
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