linux-kernel - Re: Why use /bin/sh in kernel build system?

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Date:	Wed, 30 Apr 2008 01:41:07 +0400
From:	Alexey Dobriyan <adobriyan@...il.com>
To:	Mark Rustad <mrustad@...il.com>
Cc:	Sam Ravnborg <sam@...nborg.org>, Timur Tabi <timur@...escale.com>,
	Roland Kuhn <rkuhn@....physik.tu-muenchen.de>,
	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: Why use /bin/sh in kernel build system?

On Tue, Apr 29, 2008 at 03:27:02PM -0500, Mark Rustad wrote:
> On Apr 29, 2008, at 11:45 AM, Sam Ravnborg wrote:
>
>>> I read in the latest Linux Journal magazine that someone noticed that 
>>> even
>>> though the kernel scripts say #!/bin/sh, many of them are really bash 
>>> scripts.
>>> This person went through the effort of changing the script to be true 
>>> 'sh'
>>> scripts.  Has that code been merged in?
>>
>> I have no patches pending but I may have lost them.
>> As I am 100% ignorant about what is bash and what is not bash specialities
>> I will more or less be blind when I apply them so I hope they are well
>> tested.
>
>
> So why use /bin/sh ever in the kernel build system? I consciously began 
> using /bin/bash consistently in scripts years ago because you just never 
> know what you get when you use /bin/sh. I remember replacing /bin/sh with 
> /bin/bash in gcc's build system to get it to work on some system at some 
> point. Life is too short to keep having to fight silliness like this and I 
> can't see a valid reason why a system building a Linux kernel, or for that 
> matter gcc, should not have the bash shell installed on it.

Think harder.

> And on some systems, changing /bin/sh to point to /bin/bash can result in 
> subtle problems with that system's environment, so that is not a good 
> option. At least by using /bin/bash you know what you get and the 
> dependency is then known to all.

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