*BSD News Article 32167


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From: devet@iaehv.iaehv.nl (Arjan de Vet)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions,gnu.misc.discuss
Subject: Re: Taylor UUCP on FreeBSD???
Date: 21 Jun 1994 16:45:49 +0200
Organization: Stichting Internet Access Eindhoven, the Netherlands
Lines: 29
Message-ID: <2u6uet$q1d@iaehv.iaehv.nl>
References: <1994Jun13.040754.17764@kosman.uucp> <2u53jg$rrk@pdq.coe.montana.edu> <2u5bom$cb6@glitnir.ifi.uio.no> <2u5hnf$svv@pdq.coe.montana.edu>
NNTP-Posting-Host: iaehv.iaehv.nl

In article <2u5hnf$svv@pdq.coe.montana.edu>,
Nate Williams <nate@bsd.coe.montana.edu> wrote:

>ash is more standard than bash, and is MUCH (!!!) smaller.  Why use a

You're right, ash is smaller.

>swiss army knife when a pen-knife works just fine.  If you want to use
>bash as your login shell, so be it, but I'll kick and scream when you
>tell me that it has to be the shell used for programming and such.  I
>don't need command line editing, history and the like for simple scripts
>in the system.

But many packages need a *working* /bin/sh. I tried using ash as a small
sh on Linux for some time (bash 1.12 gave problems) but it broke at least
INN's control scripts and trn's Pnews. I'm now using bash 1.14 on both
Linux and FreeBSD and it works OK.

Btw, bash containts a config.h.mini to create a version of bash without
all the interactive stuff like history, completion etc.

>And there was a big push a while back to replace bash with ash due
>to it's size.  Again, for an interactive shell bash is great, but
>for system performance it just doesn't stack up.

I want a /bin/sh first to work *correctly*, and secondly it's nice when
it's a small and fast program.

Arjan