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

[Willy Tarreau]

On Wed, Apr 30, 2008 at 01:41:07AM +0400, Alexey Dobriyan wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 29, 2008 at 03:27:02PM -0500, Mark Rustad wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> Think harder.

Hint: not every joe user may install bash into /bin... That's why we
see some scripts begin with "/usr/bin/env bash" as there are less
systems without env in /usr/bin than systems without bash in /bin (or
at all).

Willy

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