Introduction

In this article i try to find out, if Bourne Shell scripts are runnable in Bourne Again Shell without modification. If not, i advice on how to modify the code so that it runs on both Shells.

An interpreter for some variant of Bourne Shell is available as an executable /bin/sh on most Linux and UNIX systems. Writing Bourne Shell script has the possible advantage that such a script can work on all these systems with no changes to the code; be it Linux, AIX, FreeBSD, initramfs or a string passed to a C library call system(3), expressions such as

• echo hello | wc
• my_pid=$$

or

• exit 1

would always work.

Recently, i used GNU Bourne Again Shell for scripting, and i wondered if all of my longstandingly Bourne Shell established practices were seamlessly portable. So i did some research, and in this article i highlight some code constructs i found that work in Bourne Shell and do not work as expected in Bourne Again Shell. Code currently interpreted by /bin/sh and containing such constructs must be reviewed if will be interpreted by /bin/bash.

As it stands, i will focus on reserved words and built-ins, brace expansion and pipeline subprocesses.