I guess all I was trying to indirectly point out was that this behaviour is caused by the fact that Solaris has the heirloom Bourne shell as /bin/sh (which existed prior to POSIX.2). By the way, the XPG version (/usr/xpg4/bin/sh) on Solaris does support $().
I do agree and wonder why at this point Sun doesn't either update it or move it out of the way (I'm sure some customers still need/want it) and put a POSIX.2 compliant shell in its place (bash?). -Sam -----Original Message----- From: Linux on 390 Port [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Adam Thornton Sent: Tuesday, April 03, 2007 7:11 PM To: LINUX-390@VM.MARIST.EDU Subject: Re: Philosophy: connecting to a Linux server On Apr 3, 2007, at 5:43 PM, Kielek, Samuel wrote: > That's because on Linux, /bin/sh is typically just a symlink to > /bin/bash. I would imagine if you were to use bash on your Solaris > machine the result would be what you were expecting. And vice versa, > if you were to actually use the real bourne shell on Linux, it would > fail. The $() as a command substitution delimiter is guaranteed by POSIX. If a platform's /bin/sh is POSIX compatible--no matter whether or not it is actually bash--the construction will work. I submit that there is no reason to ship your system with a non- POSIX /bin/sh in the 21st century. Adam ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390