Re: Why use /bin/sh in kernel build system?

From: Mark Rustad
Date: Tue Apr 29 2008 - 16:27:49 EST


On Apr 29, 2008, at 11:45 AM, Sam Ravnborg wrote:

I read in the latest Linux Journal magazine that someone noticed that even
though the kernel scripts say #!/bin/sh, many of them are really bash scripts.
This person went through the effort of changing the script to be true 'sh'
scripts. Has that code been merged in?

I have no patches pending but I may have lost them.
As I am 100% ignorant about what is bash and what is not bash specialities
I will more or less be blind when I apply them so I hope they are well
tested.


So why use /bin/sh ever in the kernel build system? I consciously began using /bin/bash consistently in scripts years ago because you just never know what you get when you use /bin/sh. I remember replacing /bin/sh with /bin/bash in gcc's build system to get it to work on some system at some point. Life is too short to keep having to fight silliness like this and I can't see a valid reason why a system building a Linux kernel, or for that matter gcc, should not have the bash shell installed on it.

And on some systems, changing /bin/sh to point to /bin/bash can result in subtle problems with that system's environment, so that is not a good option. At least by using /bin/bash you know what you get and the dependency is then known to all.

--
Mark Rustad, MRustad@xxxxxxxxx


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