Shell standardization (for c.std.unix)

[Doug Gwyn]

Submitted-by: gwyn at smoke.brl.mil (Doug Gwyn)

In article <17504 at cs.utexas.edu> karish at mindcraft.com (Chuck Karish) writes:
>On some older SysV-based systems I've used, scripts that start with the '#'
>character are interpreted as csh scripts no matter what follows the '#'.

That was a bug in porting a pre-#! era csh feature.  On UNIX System V,
more often than not Bourne shell scripts begin with '#'.  Therefore it
was unwise to leave that vestigial feature in csh when porting it to
such an environment.

The basic answer is that there is no truly portable solution, other
than writing Bourne shell scripts starting with non-# that invoke
whatever other command is actually wanted, using some sort of path
search to find it.

Of course Plan 9's user-mounted appendable directories makes this easier..

Volume-Number: Volume 22, Number 95