On Thu, Jan 02, 2014 at 04:07:20PM +0000, Roger Leigh wrote: > On Thu, Jan 02, 2014 at 05:00:04PM +0100, Ingo Schwarze wrote: > > Hi Mike, > > > > Mike Bianchi <mbian...@foveal.com> wrote: > > > > > There is no man page for sh(1) . > > > There is no executable for /bin/sh . On Debian ... > > > > Sorry if that answer seems blunt, but it is not groff's > > problem if the shell is broken in Debian. > > It isn't broken. It's just a minimal POSIX shell. It will work > fine with any script, providing you aren't using any non-standard > bash, ksh or zsh extensions. There might possibly be some new > POSIX shell standard features which it doesn't yet support, but > I've yet to encounter any deficiencies should any exist. If you > were using such features, it would doubtless break any many other > systems as well using older POSIX shells.
Please define what a non-standard extension shell is. When troff and nroff were new, in the 1970s, /bin/sh came from a file named sh.c . My point is that #!/bin/sh is the name of a shell command that is not documented. In fact it does not exist anymore. More over, on Debian, the man page for the dash(1) shell that /bin/sh does point to _admits_ that that document is incomplete and that the command is not strictly POSIX compliant. How is someone attempting to understand a #!/bin/sh script to know what the writer intended if there is no documented way to interpret the syntax? All my shells start with #!/bin/bash or #!/bin/ksh (depending on how long ago I wrote them -- some are decades old). That way whoever reads them knows what standard I was writing to. I'm suggesting that all the groff scripts should point to the shell the writer was using when they were written. The shell is very unlikely to have been /bin/sh . -- Mike Bianchi Foveal Systems 973 822-2085 mbian...@foveal.com http://www.AutoAuditorium.com http://www.FovealMounts.com
