[tex-live] TeXLive-CD/DVD (Installation)

[George N. White III]

On 5/23/07, Sebastian Rahtz <sebastian.rahtz at oucs.ox.ac.uk> wrote:
> Edd Barrett wrote:
> >
> > ls &> somefile in ksh. Does it work? Nope. Shells are _different_!
> >
> > We call the above a "bashism"
> does you system have "ksh" installed as "/bin/sh"? If so,
> that's pretty strange and wrong. Those install scripts
> say up front
>
>  #!/bin/sh
>
> not
>
>   #!"whatever shell you fancy trying"

Whatever shell is fine is long as it conforms to IEEE Std 1003.1,
2003 Edition, which provides useful extensions that have been widely
available for more than a decade (Bolsky and Korn was originally
published in 1989, so there has been ample time to get robust
implementations): reading from multiple files, integer arithmetic,
substring operators ${x#y} and ${x%y}, arrays, functions, 8-bit
transparency and multibyte character support, and support for
menus (select).

On my debian system:
$ ls -l /bin/sh /bin/bash
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 677184 2006-12-11 17:20 /bin/bash
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root      4 2006-12-28 11:00 /bin/sh -> bash

On SGI IRIX64, "man sh" reveals

     Note: As of IRIX 6.4, sh is the Korn shell rather than the Bourne shell.

Indeed, ksh and sh are the same :
$ ls -l /bin/ksh
lrwxr-xr-x    1 root     sys           13 Jun 26  2003 /bin/ksh -> ../../sbin/sh
$ ls -l /bin/sh
lrwxr-xr-x    1 root     sys           13 Jun 26  2003 /bin/sh -> ../../sbin/sh
$ ls -l /sbin/sh
-rwxr-xr-x    1 root     sys       644100 Dec 20 00:50 /sbin/sh*
$ /bin/sh -c 'echo $RANDOM $RANDOM'
26839 19845

The last line shows that /bin/sh is not the classic Bourne shell
(which became /bin/bsh).  Debian "man sh" refers to

> >> When reading this text one is tempted to prefer binaries,
> >> specialized for the target platform in general.
> >
> > eh? Scripting languages are platform independant?
> if you have the script engine installed, yes

And you still have to be aware of differences in the bugs/features
on each platform.

-- 
George N. White III <aa056 at chebucto.ns.ca>
Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia