[rescue] ksh q... the bash

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On Friday, September 21, 2001 at 15:12:39 (-0400), Dave McGuire wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: [rescue] ksh q... the bash
>
>   Interesting.  I've been using bash exclusively for upwards of ten
> years, and it's never so much as burped.

Read the release notes for examples of past bugs.  Given the quality of
the code you can certainly expect more of the same (just as with ATT ksh!)
[i.e. search for the word 'core' in the CHANGES file]

>   This concerns me because I rather depend on bash for everyday work.
> If I'm going to hit instabilities on some other platform at some
> point, I'd rather investigate it ahead of time.

Many of the bugs I've tripped over have un-doubtably been due to
problems in glibc (and maybe even gcc), but then again the last time I
tried to use it on NetBSD is dumped core as I tried to login so I just
did a pkg_delete and forgot it ever existed.

over the years I've learned to push any and every shell to its very
limits.  I have over 1500 lines of fairly complex (but except for bash,
very portable) script just in my ~/.profile, ~/.kshrc files, etc.

If I were to rely on any shell for everyday work in scripting (as
opposed to a login shell), and I do, I'd want either a derrivative of
the SysV Bourne shell (if it's available), or the latest PDksh; with
ATT-Ksh pulling in a close third, and *BSD /bin/sh (i.e. modernised ash)
a close fourth.

Once upon a time I thought zsh had good promise as it was written in a
very readable style (which should have lent to an easy time at fixing
the many bugs early versions had), and it initialy leaning towards being
a ksh replacement, but it's gone way further and isn't really safe to
use for portable scripting (too many features that don't exist on other
shells).  Actually that's another practical reason not to use bash for
scripting -- it has too many incompatible feature that can be used
accidentally.

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

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