Articles in Series "Shells and related Scripting Languages"

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.

Given a file containing bytes of text with lines separated by the newline character (\n), one of these lines can be said to be „the last line of the file“; it is a sequence of bytes occurring in the file, for which holds:

• The sequence contains no newline character, and
• the sequence is followed by at most one newline character and no other bytes.

The task at hand is, using shell utilities, to write a procedure that makes sure that a given file contains a last line that contains a desired sequence of text characters.

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The stat command from GNU core utilities features not only a --format FORMAT option but also a --printf FORMAT one, the difference being that the latter allows for backslash escapes such as \n.

This allows for custom per-file report formats containing newlines, for example:

stat --printf 'Name: %n\nSize: %s Bytes\n' /etc/passwd

If the format string becomes more complex, the command line soon becomes unwieldy, such as:

stat --printf 'Name: %n\nOwner ID: %u\nSize: %s Bytes\nLast accessed: %x\n' /etc/passwd

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Some configuration and output text formats contain sections like the following:

foo:
   value1
   value2
bar:
   value 3

In this article, two scripts are presented that print all consecutive indented lines that follow a non-indented line that matches a search pattern given by a regular expression.

This means, given the single argument foo and the standard input above, the scripts should

• determine the line that matches foo and
• print the following two lines, but no other lines.

Also, the indentation of the printed lines should be removed.

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