"Modern" sh (was Math routines)

[Michael Meissner]

In article <BGLENDEN.90Sep2172441 at mandrill.cv.nrao.edu>
bglenden at mandrill.cv.nrao.edu (Brian Glendenning) writes:

| All this reminds me of questions I've been meaning to ask:
| 
| 1) Are there any versions of sh that don't understand # comments any
| more?

It depends on when the last time you installed the system.  If it was
1979 or such, then your shell probably doesn't understand # comments
(I don't remember whether it was in the v7 shell, or not).  But
seriously, there are probably people running ancient systems out there
that are stuck because their vendor went belly up years ago (of course
you could probably buy a 386 running UNIX nowadays for a fraction of
the original cost, but if you don't have the $5-10K at the present
time, it doesn't matter).

| 2) How common are sh's that don't understand shell functions?

Anything that is BSD based without adding from System V.  For example,
the Ultrix DECstation that I'm posting from has the musty BSD shell as
/bin/sh and the System V.2 shell with shell functions as /bin/sh5.
Another problem with the BSD shell Ultrix uses, is that test (aka '[')
is a separate command that you have to fork/exec to get to -- I
suspect echo is too.....

| I'm particularly interested in the answer for machines that scientists
| are apt to buy and use (so that old PDP-11 in your closet doesn't
| count!)

You could always recomend bash and/or ksh.
--
Michael Meissner	email: meissner at osf.org		phone: 617-621-8861
Open Software Foundation, 11 Cambridge Center, Cambridge, MA, 02142

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