Re: [PLUG] How to find parent in the shell?

[sean finney <seanius@seanius.net>]

hey guys,

On Tue, Jan 06, 2004 at 04:13:44PM -0500, Stephen Gran wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 06, 2004 at 03:50:51PM -0500, gabriel rosenkoetter said:
> > It's worth noting that $PPID is NOT documented to be defined by
> > sh(1), though you may get away with that on Linux, since it uses
> > bash(1) as sh(1). You should be aware of the portability
> > implication, though. (This will NOT work on a traditional sh(1)
> > implementation.)
> 
> Duly noted, thanks.  I will explicitly use bash instead of sh for this,
> then.

just for the sake of splitting hairs, you're not guaranteed that /bin/sh
will be bash on a debian system.  there are a couple different shells
that can replace the symlink /bin/sh -> /bin/bash, such as sash and
dash (iirc they're both minimal, statically compiled shells).  i'm not
familiar enough with either to know their level of bash compatibility,
though i believe they're both bourne-like in syntax.

of course, since bash is part of the base install for debian, you can
be reasonably sure that using bash explicitly will always work.


	sean

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