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by uriel 6194 days ago
> You can't get much more portable than bash.

I was with you up to this point, bash is not portable, and it is a hideous shell.

Any sane hacker writes all their scripts that are meant to be portable in standard bourne shell. Bourne is to bash as C is to C++. And people that put #!/bin/bash at the top of scripts that can be run by any bourne shell will burn in gnu/hell for the rest of eternity.
1 comments
moe 6193 days ago
I was with you up to this point, bash is not portable

I have yet to encounter a system where bash wasn't available, so yes I'd say it's quite portable.

You are right, though, it would be more consequental to run with vanilla bourne shell.

and it is a hideous shell.

Well, that's a holy war I'm not so interested in. In my opinion all shells are quite horrible. The idea is to pick the lowest common denominator and bash just happens to be the most popular of the bunch. Your chances of finding a working /bin/bash on any given system are still orders of magnitude higher than finding a working capistrano/fabric along with the corresponding ruby/python toolchain.

But again, I agree that if you're forced to deal with esoteric platforms then your chances of finding a working bourne shell are even higher than that.

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uriel 6193 days ago
> I have yet to encounter a system where bash wasn't available, so yes I'd say it's quite portable.

Most systems (other than linux and OS X) do not include bash by default, and not everyone is able or willing to install it (and its dependencies) just to run a silly shell script. Sh one the other hand is almost as universal as ed(1), and implements the most sane subset of bash anyway.

Other systems (eg., Plan 9) don't have bash available at all (this is considered by some as a feature), while bourne is supported, if only for backwards compatibility.

> In my opinion all shells are quite horrible.

Most mainstream shells are indeed horrible (don't get me started on csh), but [there are some quite sane shells out there](http://rc.cat-v.org).

> The idea is to pick the lowest common denominator and bash just happens to be the most popular of the bunch.

lowest common denominator != most popular of the bunch.

> Your chances of finding a working /bin/bash on any given system are still orders of magnitude higher than finding a working capistrano/fabric along with the corresponding ruby/python toolchain.

And your chances of finding a working /bin/sh on any given system are still orders of magnitude higher than finding a working /bin/bash

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