[Cialug] Tasks for learning shell scripting

Matthew Nuzum newz at bearfruit.org
Wed Sep 29 11:37:03 CDT 2010


On Wed, Sep 29, 2010 at 10:23 AM, Don Ellis <don.ellis at gmail.com> wrote:
> Another thing, bash is often the default shell and ksh is an optional add-on.
>
> For a root login, sh is often used for the login shell because it is
> on a filesystem that is mounted first, and doesn't depend on later
> boot stages. However, for some systems, bash is used for root login,
> since it is also on an initial filesystem. If a script might be run
> before other filesystems are mounted, be sure the shell it runs in is
> present when it's needed.

Well, this gets to my point. /bin/sh could be anything. In Mac OS it's
bash, in Ubuntu it's dash. What is it in other UNIX systems? Do most
come with bash pre-installed? A few years ago GNU tools always had to
be installed separately.

Bash is such an awesome shell that once you grow accustomed to it you
may have a hard time using others.

I asked someone else and they suggested using bash and just making the
student aware of the differences. This page actually explains it quite
well: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DashAsBinSh (Dash is a posix compliant
shell focused on performance)


-- 
Matthew Nuzum
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