[ale] Bash - Advanced Scripting Guide

[ale-at-ale.org at unpopularminds.org (Don Lachlan)]

On Wed, Mar 23, 2011 at 9:49 AM, Ed Cashin <ecashin at noserose.net> wrote:
> I like Blinn's book, because it covers Bourne shell programming,
> which is a subset of bash programming that also works on many
> /bin/sh shells that are not the bash---especially handy if you work
> with heterogenous environments.
>  http://www.amazon.com/Portable-Shell-Programming-Extensive-Collection/dp/0134514947

I'm not familiar with the book but I heavily recommend learning Bourne
scripting along with or even before anyone learns much Bash. GNU/Linux
distros have traditionally linked /bin/sh to /bin/bash and many, many
people invoked /bin/sh for their script but wrote for bash instead of
Bourne. Now that Debian based distros are pointing /bin/sh to
/bin/dash instead of /bin/bash, where dash is a replication of Bourne
and *only* Bourne, those scripts don't work.

Also, yes, if A is a subset of B then B is a superset of A and vice
versa, but I would agree that "subset" usually implies "taken from
another set", not just "all contained within another set" - at least
in the vernacular.

-Lachlan