Re: A POSIX and a UTF-8 question

[Daniel Qarras <dqarras@yahoo.com>]

Hi!

> One recent headline feature is that in 4.3 (but not 4.2) Wayne has
> fixed it so that (as far as I know) word splitting in sh mode is
> according to other shells.  That has probably been the most
noticeable
> problem in recent years.

I now actually tested on my FC5 laptop linking /bin/sh to a recent
zsh-4.3 from CVS and I was astonished how well it worked! I'm writing
this article from a system with /bin/sh being zsh-4.3!

There were only two glitches that I needed to fix by hand and after
that all services seem to go up and down without any problems:

1) There is unfortunately a bash-only expression used in RH's shell
function library, that is =~. However, this was used only once in
device mapper related function so that did not affect me, I just
commented it out. YMMV. (I did not find a www description for this but
it can be at least checked from bash3.1 manual pages what it does.

2) It seems that many RH scripts do something like:

cd /some/path
. functions

and in zsh-4.3 as /bin/sh this does not work, it needs to be:

cd /some/path
. ./functions

Additionally, there's one cosmetic bash feature used that seems to be
not supported by zsh: RH uses in their i18n effort tricks like:

echo -n $"Starting service foo: "

With bash I get just the normal string, with zsh I also get the $. I
did not look very carefully about this, so not sure what they are
actually doing here.

I filed a note to RH bugzilla about 1 and 2 as 206035 but in any case I
am very impressed how well zsh nowadays works as /bin/sh in a Linux
distribution.

Cheers!



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