Re: [PATCH] t0300-credentials: Word around a solaris /bin/sh bug

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Feb 3, 2012, 12:06 UTC
Message-ID: <20120203120657.GB31441@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <7vr4ycu3ty.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>

On Thu, Feb 02, 2012 at 05:02:17PM -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Show 10 quoted lines

> Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:
> 
> > I wonder if a better solution is to use a known-good shell instead of
> > trying to work around problems in a bogus shell.
> 
> Yeah, I think that is a better approach.
> 
> What prevents us from doing 's|^#! */bin/sh|$#$SHELL_PATH|' on everything
> in t/ directory (I am not suggesting to do this. I just want to know if
> there is a reason we want hardcoded "#!/bin/sh" for some instances).

The quoting is more annoying, because you usually don't want interpolation on the rest of the lines of your embedded script. So:

  cat >foo.sh <<\EOF
  #!/bin/sh
  echo my arguments are "$@"
  EOF

cannot have the mechanical replace you mentioned above. It would need:

  cat >foo.sh <<EOF
  #!$SHELL_PATH
  echo my arguments are "\$@"
  EOF

or:

  {
    echo "#!$SHELL_PATH" &&
    cat <<EOF
    echo my arguments are "$@"
    EOF
  } >foo.sh

When I have hard-coded "#!/bin/sh", my thinking is usually "this is less cumbersome to type and to read, and this script-let is so small that even Solaris will get it right".

-Peff