On Wed, Oct 31, 2012 at 12:21 AM, Hans Hagen <pragma@wxs.nl> wrote:

On 30-10-2012 22:33, Bill Meahan wrote:

On 10/30/2012 01:39 PM, Hans Hagen wrote:

sure, till one replaces bash by something non-bash-ish while the user
still thinks he's running bash (i always fear the moment that someone
decides that swapping the 'cp' arguments without renaming the command
is a good idea -)

(i wouldn't be surprised if it can backfire badly in more complex
situations)

Hans

My background is in "commercial" Unix and I've had situations like
having to administer an HP box (HPUX) a Sun box (Solaris) a Teradata box
(some flavor or other of SYS V R4) some BSD and Linux on the same day.
:) Only thing I could count on was the "official" AT&T Bourne shell syntax.

I use ksh93 (the AT&T distribution) as my login shell.

This assumes control over the login shell as well as control over what the launchers of system processes use. I must admit that till now I always assumed some stability in this, which is probably okay as long as one sticks to one specific distribution (of linux).

I think that the main problem is that #! /bin/sh can mean anything (although in your case I suppose you expect it to be the bourne shell).

So the question is, should the scripts that come with context (like the installer) be explicit and become #! /bin/bash ?