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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!munnari.OZ.AU!spool.mu.edu!newspump.sol.net!howland.erols.net!newsfeed.internetmci.com!news-in2.uu.net!news.Arizona.EDU!usenet From: john@burdell.ece.arizona.edu (John Galbraith) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Is /bin/sh OK? Date: 10 Oct 1996 23:56:58 GMT Organization: The University of Arizona Lines: 25 Distribution: world Message-ID: <JOHN.96Oct10165658@burdell.ece.arizona.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: burdell.ece.arizona.edu I recently installed the 2.1.5-RELEASE. ( It went totally smoothly over the network - nice! ) I went to compile some programs, but in the process I noticed that many Makefiles and scripts that are run when common programs (like xemacs) are built fail with really stupid errors, like 'cd' fails to enter a directory that you know is there. Remembering back (way back) to the 386bsd days, I remembered problems with /bin/sh. I replaced my /bin/sh with a copy of bash, and sure enough, everything built smoothly. I would have thought that this bug was smunched long ago. Is this really the right thing to do, or is something else hosed with my installation? Well - one thing is not so smooth. The system won't boot with /bin/sh replaced with bash. I think it is because the shared libraries are not yet available or something like that. Maybe a statically linked bash would get around this, but it seems like I am hitting this problem from the wrong angle. What is the deal with the stock /bin/sh? John BTW: I have been using Solaris-x86 for a while to do some java consulting. That is over, so I immediately came back to FreeBSD. It is great to be back, everyone should know. I found Solaris-x86 to be a truly miserable hack and lots of things don't work right (like gdb...). I guess I was totally spoiled after several years of using FreeBSD.