Re: [PATCH] Allow shell scripts to run with non-Bash /bin/sh

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Sep 21, 2007, 23:52 UTC
Message-ID: <7v8x6zinjf.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <20070921214346.GF97288@void.codelabs.ru>

Eygene Ryabinkin <rea-git@codelabs.ru> writes:

Show 17 quoted lines

> Good day.
>
> I had found that FreeBSD's /bin/sh refuses to work with git 1.5.3.2.
> correctly: no flags are recognized.  The details and fix are below.
> I don't currently know if the Bash's behaviour is POSIXly correct
> or the 'case' statement semantics is not very well defined.   But
> the following patch fixes the things for the FreeBSD.
>
> Here we go.
>
> -----
>
> Option parsing in the Git shell scripts uses the construct 'while
> case "$#" in 0) break ;; esac; do ... done'.  This is neat, because
> it needs no external commands invocation.  But in the case when
> /bin/sh is not GNU Bash (for example, on FreeBSD) this cycle will
> not be executed at all.

I do not doubt that "while case $# in 0) break ;; esac" does not work for your shell. But I think the above comment is grossly misleading.

Don't mention bash there. You sound as if you are blaming bashism, but the thing is, your shell is simply broken.

You have other choices than bash on BSD don't you?

My quick test shows that ksh, pdksh and dash seem to work correctly. This idiom is what I picked up around late 80's from somebody, and kept using on many variants of Unices. I would find quite surprising that something that claims to be a shell does not work correctly. Even /bin/sh that comes with Solaris seems to work correctly, which should tell you something.

OpenBSD's /bin/sh seems to be Ok; I do not know whose shell they use, but it seems to be hard-linked to /bin/ksh which is pdksh.