*BSD News Article 80427


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From: bkogawa@primenet.com (Bryan Ogawa)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: Is /bin/sh OK?
Date: 11 Oct 1996 12:29:02 -0700
Organization: Primenet Services for the Internet
Lines: 37
Message-ID: <53m75u$c1j@nnrp1.news.primenet.com>
References: <JOHN.96Oct10165658@burdell.ece.arizona.edu>
X-Posted-By: bkogawa@206.165.5.109 (bkogawa)

john@burdell.ece.arizona.edu (John Galbraith) writes:

>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? 

Hm.  This sounds like what I experience when I use a Makefile that expects
gnu make instead of the berkeley make.  Usually I try doing gmake instead
of make when this happens (when you install the gnu make package for
freebsd, it installs itself as gmake).

>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?

I personally haven't noticed anything that I can trace to sh weirdness,
but I don't know enough about bourne shell to know these sorts of things.

>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.
--
bryan k. ogawa  <bkogawa@primenet.com>  <bkogawa@netvoyage.net>