[CentOS] Real sh? Or other efficient shell for non-interactive scripts

[Warren Young]

On Apr 27, 2015, at 9:07 AM, Joerg Schilling <Joerg.Schilling at fokus.fraunhofer.de> wrote:
> 
> Heirloom added support for uname -S and for some linux ulimit extensions but 
> then stopped working on the code after a few months

Ah.  I had no idea it was in a state of disrepair.

>> I see that you already wrote up the differences between osh and bosh in an earlier post.  Is there a good reason why these comparisons are not on the Schily Tools web page already? :)
> 
> The schily tools act as a container to publish the current code state. There is 
> no such maintained web page.

I was referring to the summary on the SourceForge page, where you just list the contents of the package without explaining why one would want to download it.

> I would be interested to understand why Heirloom seems to so well known and my 
> portability attempts seem to be widely unknown.

I can think of several explanations:

1. The Heirloom pages explain what features each download provides, rather than just give a list of program names.

If you tell me that I can download “bsh”, I have no idea why I want bsh based solely on its name.  If you tell me that I can download “od”, I reply that I already have a functioning version of od, thank you very much. :)

2. Many of those who might be interested in your osh are already well served by the Ancient Unix V7 + SIMH combination:

  http://www.in-ulm.de/~mascheck/various/ancient/

You are left with the subset of people who want to run something other than the shells that come with their OS, and who want it to run natively.

I should point out that a lot of people using the Ancient Unix images actually don’t want old bugs fixed.

3. It’s not clear from the files I’ve peeked into in your source distribution when bsh first became available in an OSI-approved form, but it seems to be sometime in the 2005-2007 range.

If that is true, then bsh is several years late to fill a gap already filled by ash, in the same way that the prior existence of bash makes the open-source version of ksh93 uninteresting to most people.

This is why you need a web page to sell your project: to explain why someone should abandon bash, zsh, ash, dash, posh, ksh93u+, mksh…

4. CDDL annoys a lot of people.  Yes, I know, GPL annoys a lot of people, too.  But again, you’re going up against ash, which is BSD, which annoys almost no one. :)