Re: Fwd: REVIEW REQUEST - user manual generation

[Vincent Belaïche]

Hello,

Le 03/06/2016 à 23:33, Karl Berry a écrit :
>     The latter is no longer an issue if you switch to $().
>
> Solaris /bin/sh does not support $() --
>
> $ x=$(echo hello)
> syntax error: `x=$' unexpected
>
> As you know, Andreas, we have always tried to make texi2dvi (and GNU
> shell scripts in general) work under a least-common-denominator shell,

do you mean sh, I think that $(...) was in bash from the beginning. The
first release of bash was published in 1988 --- see

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bourne-Again_shell#Histoire

but at that time it was probably not yet that popular. I had my first
Unix lesson in 1991, and our teacher told us that csh was the future of
sh --- in the same lesson he said that there was the bad editor vi and
the good editor Emacs, but he personnally was still using vi... ha !
Incidentally, that was also the first time I was in contact with Emacs.

> which forces omission of plenty of many useful features.
>
> Another option, with its own pros and cons, is to try to detect whether
> the current shell is insufficient and look for a better one.  In this
> case, as is well known, /usr/xpg4/bin/sh.  -k


Tell me if I am wrong: isn't $(...) a bash addition as compared to sh.

Then, it would be sufficient to replace the shebang

#! /bin/sh

by

#! /bin/bash

if we want to guarantee that $(...) is available.

Anyway, we can make it with `...` also, even though it is a little more
tricky. See my previous email.

VBR,
        Vincent.