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

m.roth at 5-cent.us
2015-04-24T20:04:48Z

Stephen Harris wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 24, 2015 at 10:38:25AM -0400, m.roth at 5-cent.us wrote:
>> Fascinating. As I'd been in Sun OS, and started doing admin work
when it
>> became Solaris, I'd missed that bit. A question: did the license
>> agreement include payment, or was it just restrictive on distribution?
>
> In 1990, when I started using ksh88, it was totally commercial.  Binaries
> were $$$ and source was $$$$.  We bought the source and compiled it for
> SunOS, Ultrix and various SYSVr[23] machines (one machine was so old it
> didn't understand #! and so needed it placed as /bin/sh).

I just (finally) got into Unix in '91, and didn't do any admin work,
just
programming, until later in '95, and I had nothing to do with what
software got installed, at least to start (I sat there while someone else
was doing the installing). And that was a Sun, anyway.
>
> By 1998, ksh93 was free (as in beer) but was restricted distribution.
> Eventually ksh93 became properly free, but by this point bash was
> already popular in the Free-nix arena and had even made it into
> Solaris, AIX and others.
>
>> I didn't know bash till I got to CentOS (I don't remember it in
RH
>> 9...),
>
> Yes it was.  It was in RH(not EL) 4, which was the first RH I used.

Ah. I don't remember if I was using csh, or ksh, and didn't realize
about
bash. I *think* I vaguely remember that sh seemed to be more capable than
I remembered.

My first RH was 5, late nineties. First time I looked at linux and
installed, it was '95, and slack. (We'll ignore the Coherent that I
installed on my beloved 286 in the late 80's).
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