sh compatibility again :->

[Andrej Borsenkow <borsenkow.msk@sni.de>]

On Wed, 31 Jul 1996, Zoltan Hidvegi wrote:

> 
> Zsh can emulate the POSIX shell and the Korn shell quite well when it is
> invoked as sh or ksh respectively.  /bin/sh can be safely linked to zsh.
>                                     ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

I wouldn't put it in. I dared to link zsh to /bin/sh and reboot the
system. It did come up - without /proc, /dev/fd and network ;-<

Here are some points, where zsh choked.

1. It doesn't like malformed constructs like

A="`cat /some/file"    (note missed backtick)

zsh tries to parse command substitution behind closing double-quote, and
ends up with `missing "' at the end of script. Our /bin/sh stops at
closing double-quote. In POSIX the result is undefined - thus, techically
neither violate it. 

2. Our /bin/sh silently ignores break's in case statement (I mean it; it
doesn't break out of case). zsh loudly complaints (well, it is rather
cosmetic).

3. The last bit, when I stopped this experiment. Our sh starts complex
command with redirections in subshell; that is

while read;
do
....
done < /some/file

is evaluated in subshell. The problem is, that some scripts use EXIT!!
rather than break to such loop. Well, I could do nothing against it.


These are just FYI; in no way would I suggest to mimic every historical
(broken?) sh; but it still means, that it is *not* safe to link /bin/sh to
zsh on *every* system. Probably, statement about POSIX conformance is
enough?

But the following things could probably be fixed 

4. Traditional /bin/sh interprets `set -' as set +xv. It could be well
undocumented (it is not on our system) but still is so. Could anybody test
it on more than one systems? zsh silently sets positional parameters to
null. At least on our system many startup scripts include 

set -$DEBUG

at the script start (intent is to set DEBUG=x somewhere in /etc/rc2 to see
what's going on). Under zsh, script just loses its arguments and ends up
with error (it is SVR4 startup scripts are called with
/bin/sh /etc/rc2.d/S*something start
if `start' is not there, script just exits). 

5. Currently zsh sets BSD_ECHO when running as sh. Our sh does support
escapes in echo; I recall that SCO sh does it as well. I don't know about
others. What about relaxing it? If scripts doesn't rely upon escapes in
echo, it would make no harm.


Sorry for long mail. Actually (apart from echo) I found *no* problems,
caused by zsh; so it is more our /bin/sh to blame ;)

greetings

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Andrej Borsenkow 		Fax:   +7 (095) 252 01 05
SNI ITS Moscow			Tel:   +7 (095) 252 13 88

NERV:  borsenkow.msk		E-Mail: borsenkow.msk@sni.de
-------------------------------------------------------------------------