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There’s portability and there’s portability. I don’t really care about targeting, say, IRIX, or z/OS, or the early-2000s-era Windows POSIX Subsystem. But I do

by derefr 6y ago

There’s portability and there’s portability. I don’t really care about targeting, say, IRIX, or z/OS, or the early-2000s-era Windows POSIX Subsystem. But I do care about targeting Linux, macOS/iOS, all the modern living BSDs, and Android (where applicable.) I also maybe care about letting my software run under a Linux Busybox userland. It’d be great to know what the lowest-common-demoninator standard is for just that set of targets. I don’t care about POSIX, but if that set of targets had a common formal named standard, I’d adhere to it rigorously. Since it doesn’t, I just mostly adhere to POSIX — except where it gets to be too much (like having to write 1000-line Bourne Shell scripts.) When that happens, I look around to see if the set of targets I care about all do something the same way. If they do (such as all happening to ship some — perhaps ancient — version of Bash), then I break away from POSIX and take advantage of that commonality. I don’t know enough about all the things these OSes do or do not have in common to truly code to the implicit standard 100% of the time. I wish I did. So, in most respects, wherever I haven’t done independent research, I have to hold myself to a much stricter standard — POSIX. But it’s only ignorance keeping me doing it!

simias 6y ago
>I don’t really care about targeting, say, IRIX, or z/OS, or the early-2000s-era Windows POSIX Subsystem. Sure, those are very niche, but not all BSDs or every Linux distros have bash in the base distribution. And if you work with embedded system bash is very much a luxury. You mention busybox but this one is very much a crap shot because everything in busybox is opt-in. You want to use `seq`? Better make sure that it's configured. On the other hand you almost certainly won't have bash on these systems either. At any rate if the alternative is between having to install python, ruby, perl or lua on my machine or having to maintain and hack on ginormous bash scripts I know what I'll chose. But in general I like your approach, it's pragmatic. It's just pretty hard these days to find a system that ships bash but can't give you some decent scripting support, at least in my experience.
- MichaelMoser123 6y ago
  not just limited to embedded environments, some docker images used in cloud setups also don't have bash - alpine doesn't have it. The alpine image is used a lot, due to its small size; you can add bash easily, but bash is not part of the base image (there is a difference if you are in an ssh session to a container that doesn't have access to the net) docker run --rm -it alpine / # bash /bin/sh: bash: not found
floatingatoll 6y ago
Note that targeting bash on macOS means targeting bash v3, as Apple is not updating to bash v4+ (due to GPLv3) and has changed the default interactive shell to zsh in macOS 11.0+.

by derefr 6y ago

simias 6y ago

>I don’t really care about targeting, say, IRIX, or z/OS, or the early-2000s-era Windows POSIX Subsystem. Sure, those are very niche, but not all BSDs or every Linux distros have bash in the base distribution. And if you work with embedded system bash is very much a luxury. You mention busybox but this one is very much a crap shot because everything in busybox is opt-in. You want to use `seq`? Better make sure that it's configured. On the other hand you almost certainly won't have bash on these systems either. At any rate if the alternative is between having to install python, ruby, perl or lua on my machine or having to maintain and hack on ginormous bash scripts I know what I'll chose. But in general I like your approach, it's pragmatic. It's just pretty hard these days to find a system that ships bash but can't give you some decent scripting support, at least in my experience.

MichaelMoser123 6y ago
not just limited to embedded environments, some docker images used in cloud setups also don't have bash - alpine doesn't have it. The alpine image is used a lot, due to its small size; you can add bash easily, but bash is not part of the base image (there is a difference if you are in an ssh session to a container that doesn't have access to the net) docker run --rm -it alpine / # bash /bin/sh: bash: not found

floatingatoll 6y ago

Note that targeting bash on macOS means targeting bash v3, as Apple is not updating to bash v4+ (due to GPLv3) and has changed the default interactive shell to zsh in macOS 11.0+.