On 2007-08-07 15:14:42 -0700, David Brodbeck wrote: > On Aug 7, 2007, at 2:39 PM, Vincent Lefevre wrote: >>> - Every Unix-like system you encounter will have some version of the >>> Bourne >>> shell. Not every system will have Python. >> >> Not every system has bash. > > Well, yeah. That's why I said "Bourne shell" and not "bash."
But you said "learning bash scripting" just before that. And bash is not really a Bourne shell anyway, since it is incompatible with the traditional Bourne shell (in particular concerning the signal handling). So, one has two kinds of Bourne-like ("sh") shells: the traditional Bourne shell and POSIX shells. This makes writing portable sh scripts very difficult. >> I now write all my portable scripts in Perl since it >> is on every system I've met. > > It's not any more guaranteed than bash, though. For example, FreeBSD > no longer includes Perl with the base system; you have to install it > as a port. One can hope that every sensible admin would install it. > Personally I think filenames with spaces in them are an abomination that > should have never been permitted, but I lost that argument ages ago. ;) I agree. This can even make confusion when mentioning filenames in text files (not just in scripts...). Non-ASCII characters should also be avoided (because of Unicode's NFC/NFD forms, but also homoglyphs). -- Vincent Lefèvre <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> - Web: <http://www.vinc17.org/> 100% accessible validated (X)HTML - Blog: <http://www.vinc17.org/blog/> Work: CR INRIA - computer arithmetic / Arenaire project (LIP, ENS-Lyon) -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]