Beginning portable shell scripting

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1. eltoozeroJan 2018
   Sometimes - perhaps often - you are in situations where you have no control over the shell, in these cases writing "portable" shell scripts is helpful.

   I have been enjoying "Beginning Portable Shell Scripting"[0] by Peter Seebach for this very reason.

   [0]https://www.apress.com/us/book/9781430210436

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2. Alexqw85Jan 2018
   I would like to second this recommendation. I have found "Beginning Portable Shell Scripting" to be invaluable --- and far more comprehensive than I expected given the "Beginning" in the title.

   I highly recommend it (and the POSIX docs) to anyone who is is interested in portable shell programming.

   ---Alex

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3. chubotAug 2017
   That's not useful advice. That's what I mean by "memorizing the manual" (or POSIX spec).

   There's no way to test that the commands you're running will actually work on someone else's machine, other than by "memorizing the manual".

   I have an entire book on this:

   https://www.amazon.com/Beginning-Portable-Shell-Scripting-Pr...

   It goes through all the commands and common versions of Unix and which flags are likely to work, etc.

   Even that book admits there's a lot of folklore, because nobody has actually gone and tested things recently. Something as simple as safely writing with "echo" is a problem. You can argue that any script that uses echo $foo is incorrect (because $foo might be a flag). Conversely 'echo --' is supposed to print -- by POSIX.

   The only people who are likely to even attempt this are people whose full-time job it is to write shell scripts, or the authors of tools like autoconf, which must generate portable shell. autoconf shell is a good example of the anachronisms and hoops you need to jump through to support this style.

   Nobody else has time for that, because they have to spend their mental energy writing C and C++, not shell and make. So that's why we have pretty low standards for the quality of build systems. The tools aren't there to support writing a robust and easy-to-use build system.

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