R devel - Dec 2003 - What version is sh?

I'm trying to write an automatic check of the toolset installation for
R.  It'll get all the tools to print their version numbers, and
complain if they aren't acceptable ones.

However, I can't see how to get sh to print version information.  Is
there some way to do it?

The sh I'm worried about is the one that comes with Cygwin, if there
isn't a standard approach.

Duncan Murdoch

On Mon, 29 Dec 2003 14:40:45 -0500, I wrote:
>I'm trying to write an automatic check of the toolset installation for
>R.  It'll get all the tools to print their version numbers, and
>complain if they aren't acceptable ones.
>
>However, I can't see how to get sh to print version information.  Is
>there some way to do it?
>
>The sh I'm worried about is the one that comes with Cygwin, if there
>isn't a standard approach.
Several people suggested the GNU standard "--version" command line
option, which works for most of the Cygwin utilities, but not this
one.  Dirk Eddelbeuttel said
>I'd suspect that it is one of the small shells which e.g. Debian calls
them
>ash and dash; these are used on boot floppies and the like where space is at
>a premium.  As a consequence, they may not support all full-blown
>command-line options. So to test the shell, you may need to run a small
>shell script containing the features you want to make use of later.
I think it must be one of those.  The executable is about 1/8 the size
of the bash executable.

Duncan Murdoch

man sh says it's ash

Latchezar
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Duncan Murdoch [mailto:dmurdoch@pair.com] 
> Sent: Monday, December 29, 2003 7:06 PM
> To: r-devel@stat.math.ethz.ch
> Subject: Re: [Rd] What version is sh?
> 
> 
> On Mon, 29 Dec 2003 14:40:45 -0500, I wrote:
> 
> >I'm trying to write an automatic check of the toolset 
> installation for 
> >R.  It'll get all the tools to print their version numbers, and 
> >complain if they aren't acceptable ones.
> >
> >However, I can't see how to get sh to print version information. 
Is
> >there some way to do it?
> >
> >The sh I'm worried about is the one that comes with Cygwin, if
there
> >isn't a standard approach.
> 
> Several people suggested the GNU standard "--version" command 
> line option, which works for most of the Cygwin utilities, 
> but not this one.  Dirk Eddelbeuttel said
> 
> >I'd suspect that it is one of the small shells which e.g. 
> Debian calls 
> >them ash and dash; these are used on boot floppies and the 
> like where 
> >space is at a premium.  As a consequence, they may not support all 
> >full-blown command-line options. So to test the shell, you 
> may need to 
> >run a small shell script containing the features you want to 
> make use 
> >of later.
> 
> I think it must be one of those.  The executable is about 1/8 
> the size of the bash executable.
> 
> Duncan Murdoch
> 
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