I am writing several shell scripts using Ubuntu/bash and I would like to ensure that they are portable to OSX.
I have previously had trouble when I tried to use non-portable behavior of certain commands. Is there anything like an emulator for another shell environment?
I'm looking for an option besides just researching the portability of each command that I use.
Terminal.app is just a GUI, like xterm. It doesn't execute scripts. OS X uses bash, just like Ubuntu. It may, however, use a different version. For instance, OS X 10.9 uses bash version 3.2.51.
What you're describing is not Terminal and probably isn't bash. It's probably "the entirety of the command line tools that are installed by default." Things like grep, sed, and cut, and in practice you mean "the entire OS." There is no environment other than the OS that is going to capture all of those. Even if they did, you'd still need to worry about numerous other portability concerns like whether there is /proc filesystem (there isn't one on OS X).
Do you really mean to suggest that it only has to run on Ubuntu and OS X? FreeBSD is quite different. And there are many platforms that don't include all the GNU extensions that are common on Linux. In principle you could write to the POSIX standard, which they are all supposed to follow, but that won't really take you that far. In practice, the only way to know that you're portable to a platform is to test it on that platform.
But short version: no. You have to research first. And then you have to actually test it on each version of each platform you support.
There is another option though: don't use bash and don't use the low-level command line tools like grep. Use a higher-level language that you know will be on the target platform like Python, Perl, or Ruby. Then you just have to work to an old enough version of these languages and stay within the standard library. That's typically much easier to keep portable than bash scripts.
Related
TL;DR: Whats the most optimal way to write portable general-purpose automation scripts for Windows, Mac and Linux?
Longer version:
I work with different platforms and often write shell scripts to automate things (run programs and other scripts, manipulate files and directories, etc).
The problem is that sh/bash substitutes on Windows are tricky, complex, often incompatible or lack some native unix tools. And cygwin scares a regular user, in case when I share some of my scripts with the others.
I find that .bat is very limited and ugly. And I didn't use Powershell a lot, but it looks a bit overcomplicated to me (or should I just give it another try?).
What would you recommend to do in such case? Have you had similar challenges, how did you solve them?
I would advice you use some configuration manager as Ansible, Puppet or Chef. Since their sole purpose is to automate things, and some of them are cross platform. Google each one I mentioned, scripts are generally easy to write in them and they will work on all the platforms, but you will need to install the manager itself on each platform, which can be achieved with init.sh or with a simple powershell script.
I'm making a bash script and I'd like to make sure it's portable. For context, the command will be the part of tmux-resurrect plugin.
I want to use this command: ps -eo ppid,command. Is that command portable?
I'd also be glad to hear how to check that myself. For example: maybe there's a service that can test commands on the large number of operating systems etc?
The POSIX Standard is publicly available on the web. Yes, ps is one of the standardized utilities. If you stick to the standard options, you should be pretty portable.
Note however, that forcing some utilities to behave posixly correct, setting certain environment variables might be necessary. In particular, systems using the GNU utilities may need POSIXLY_CORRECT=yes or similar being set.
Whenever I write shell scripts (mostly software development utilities or build tools) I've generally tried to avoid using bash in favor of using plain old sh for portability. However lately I've been running into more and more issues where useful features are not available, or behavior is actually less consistent across systems using sh then it is using bash, since sh is aliased to different shells...
As I understand it, sh is the oldest Unix shell and carefully written sh scripts should in theory run on pretty much any system out there... but it also seems there are about 9000 different variants of every major shell, too. Doesn't using bash as your script interpreter effectively limit your script's portability? Sure, no problems on OS X or pretty much any Linux out there, but what about the BSDs? Solaris, AIX, HP-UX? What do you do if you really want to run on everything?
I know bash can be installed on virtually any OS but it is really a first class citizen on all relevant modern systems? Does it come pre-installed? I'm just not really sure whether it's best to avoid or embrace bash with the intent of having the most consistent and portable overall experience.
What do you do if you really want to run on everything?
You follow the POSIX standard for sh (and the tools you're calling) and hope that the target OS does so too. Any modern product called "UNIX" must follow this standard, and customarily (though not universally), the standard shell will be called /bin/sh. The BSDs and Linux distros tend to aim at POSIX compatibility as well.
Doesn't using bash as your script interpreter effectively limit your script's portability?
Yes, but it depends on your target audience as you noted. If it's a short script, it's worth testing under dash (Ubuntu and Debian's default shell) for POSIX compatibility.
Whenever I start thinking about portability issues in my shell script, I switch to another language. Perl is widely available and generally a good choice for scripts, but if your tools are to be consumed by Python, Ruby, $lang developers, use $lang to its full potential.
bash itself is just a plain C program, does not need special authority to run, can be put in any location. You can easily build it from source. Basically, you can run bash if you need to and doesn't need the administrator of the system to install it.
As long as it is in your path, you can always code your script with the line.
#!/usr/bin/env bash
I've gone through the academic Scheme stuff (read SICP, The Little Schemer, The Seasoned Schemer, TSPL) and been playing with Scheme as a toy for a while.
But I want to get practical.
Today I needed to write a shell script to do some batch file processing, and thought "why not do it in Scheme?". I did, and it was a joy.
Now I'm forced to wonder what the best implementation is for shell script type stuff.
I know all implementations differ in terms of what they implement beyond R5RS. (Basically, they differ in all the useful and practical extensions you'd want in a scripting language).
So I'd like to pick one implementation and stick to it. I'm looking for something that:
Is cross platform (Linux, OS X, Windows).
Has extensions that are useful in day-to-day shell scripting, and those extensions are part of the base install.
Is easy to install. (e.g. there are a number of pre-built binaries, and/or it is a standard package on many distros.)
Is actively developed, with an active community.
Has Unicode support.
I've been using Gambit so far. It seems to satisfy the above constraints. PLT seems like overkill. Wondering about Guile, MIT/GNU, etc.
PLT Scheme meets all of your criteria. Since it looks like you know that already, you should to use the MzScheme package. MzScheme is the runtime on top of which all of PLT is built.
If you were to download the full PLT Scheme install it would seem large as it includes a lot of documentation and an IDE in addition to the runtime.
Have you heard of scsh? I haven't used it, but it sounds a lot like what you want.
I recommend Gauche, which is:
Running on Linux, OS X, Windows w/
Cygwin and some other UNIX-like
platforms,
The base install contains
POSIX-compliant system libraries and
useful modules such as
network protocols, file system,
DBM, multithreading, etc...
Several package system such as MacPorts, apt-get, yum are available
(or just say configure, make and
make install),
There are active English and Japanese mailing list,
Supports UTF-8 as an internal encoding.
I know this question has kind-a started "religious" wars in past and there might not be one correct answer. But after working with ksh and csh for last 3-4 years and going through the pain of porting from one to another or applying a common piece of logic to multiple versions (read as legacy code), if I am writing a new script, I would go for ksh, but out of compulsion rather than choice. Is there a better option other than ksh/csh? Also something that is portable across Unixes (Solaris/HP/IBM/FreeBSD) and Linux (and if I am not asking too much or it if does make sense all Linux flavors)
Waiting for suggestions ...
Peace :)
Devang Kamdar
I would suggest plain old sh, which is available everywhere.
Also, it is worth noting that portability involves not only shell but also other commands used in a script such as awk, grep, ps or echo.
If you really want it to be portable (I don't know that any shell-script is maintainable), I would specify #!/bin/sh and test with dash and if possible other shells.
I would expect BASH to be the widest spread shell at the moment since it is the default for many Linux distributions (it can even run on Windows with cygwin, but that's probably true for the other shells, too).
An alternative might be to not use the shell itself for scripting but one of the scriping languages out there like perl, python, ruby, ...
I usually use ksh. I find that it's a good compromise between features and portability. It's there (or a compatible version is available) on most Linux boxes and Solaris. It's a while since I used HP-UX (thankfully) but I'm pretty sure it was available there too.
If all the machines you need to support are modern, bash might be an option. Solaris 10 comes with a copy. It's the default on most Linux machines.
Your lowest common denominator is going to be Bourne (sh), so that's worth considering if portability is your main concern. It's missing some of the more friendly features of ksh and bash though.
It's still worth steering clear of csh/tcsh for scripting. Csh Programming Considered Harmful is an oldie but still largely relevant.
My answer would be perl.
Does everything 'sh' 'bash' etc can do in a nicer more elegant manner.
Also it is actually more portable. A given version perl is very consistant accross all platforms. There are no significant differences between the Linux, Solaris and AIX distributions whereas porting shell scripts between these platforms is a real pain.
And it works on all windows paltforms! Provided you avoid backticks and "system()" your script has a good chance of running.
Python! Check out iPython, which is an enhanced Python interpreter. Also: Python for Unix and Linux System Adminitration.
You can write great portable scripts, and it's fun.