OT: High End SCO System for Filepro

[Jean-Pierre A. Radley]

Bob Stockler propounded (on Thu, Nov 10, 2005 at 05:01:47PM -0500):
| Jean-Pierre A. Radley wrote (on Thu, Nov 10, 2005 at 04:21:25PM -0500):
| 
| | What constructions are you using in Bourne scripts that break under
| | Korn? 
| 
| Good question.  However, we were cautioned on OSR 5.0.x not to
| make /bin/ksh root's default shell because it might cause some
| scripts to fail.

I have no information from SCO about this, but I have always suspected
that said cautionary warning was issued because SCO couldn't make a case
that it was sufficiently important to its user community to design and
run quality control tests to see whether scripts run by cron or scripts
run at boot time might fail were root's shell switched to /bin/ksh.

In the absence of such experiments, I presume that SCO's conservative
stance kicked in: "just say no".

But unless I'm daydreaming, I think there have been reports of people
switching root's shell to ksh or to bash with no nefarious consequences.

I know that I once changed root's shell to csh and had no problems,
*provided* I made sure to have every /etc/rc*.d script start with
'#!/bin/sh'.  I no longer make that change of root's shell since SCO's
/bin/csh is still an abortion.

I would have switched to tcsh but until OSR 5.0.7's UP3 or MP4, or until
OSR 6.0.0, I only had the tcsh I installed in /usr/local/bin, thus not
available in maintenance mode (because I *never* let /usr/local be on
the root filesystem).

-- 
JP