Hi, A maintainer script with a #!/bin/sh line should only use posix syntax. If one needs more features (e.g. test -L), one can instead use #!/bin/bash.
However, this seems unnecessarily restricted to me. dash also knows the non-POSIX extensions to the test builtin. So if /bin/sh pointed to dash, my script would still run. Is there any way to make this more liberal? A rule like "if it can be executed by any of the bourne-shell clones A, B, C in Debian, it can be used"? In other words: What is the purpose of the requirement that /bin/sh-scripts may only use POSIXly correct syntax? Is the purpose to allow custom distributions or local administrators to easily replace /bin/sh with some smaller shell provided by Debian, and to easily identify maintainer scripts that won't work then? Or is it rather that also people outside Debian can make use of the code? In the former case a check like I proposed above would make sense, in the latter it wouldn't. TIA, Frank -- Frank Küster, Biozentrum der Univ. Basel Abt. Biophysikalische Chemie