Bash Quirkiness

[Robert P. J. Day]

On Tue, 27 Jul 2004, James Wilkinson wrote:

> Robert P. J. Day wrote:

>> nothing says that bash has to be POSIX-compliant in normal mode,
>> though.  technically, i suppose the bash developers could make any
>> changes they want, and if it broke one of your scripts, well, tough,
>> you don't have a bash-compliant script and you shouldn't be trying to
>> run it with bash.
>
> Sounds a good way to lose users and gain forks to me...

actually, i don't see a real problem here.  if you have historical 
scripts that insist on using `...`, chances are you might not have 
been running them under bash in the first place.  and if you were, you 
still have the option of running them under any POSIX-compliant shell, 
including "bash --posix".

all the bash folks would be doing is insisting that, if you wanted to 
write any new scripts, and you wanted to run them officially under 
bash, you'd have to use $(...).  which, frankly, is a far more 
aesthetically appealing way to present it, IMHO.  i don't think 
dropping support for `` would cause major grief.

anyway, we've wandered pretty far afield from fedora-related stuff. 
if you want to talk scripting, you might want to join the scripting 
list at www.moongroup.com.  we just had a fascinating discussion of 
bash's process substitution feature.  my, but we are a bunch of wild 
and crazy folks over there.

rday