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Shell programmingShell programmingPosted Dec 8, 2012 2:11 UTC (Sat) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)In reply to: Shell programming by sitaram Parent article: Quotes of the week
Even if they were OpenSource (which they are), you'd need to compile 20-year old crufty C code and quite likely newer GCC versions won't do the trick. Waaaaay too much work.
On the other hand, I've ported 15-year old Python scripts without much problems. There were several non-backward-compatible changes in Python since then, but they are fairly minor.
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Shell programming Posted Dec 8, 2012 6:53 UTC (Sat) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]
Some anecdara:
For Python, one I hit today was to change "except BaseException as e:" to "except BaseException: e = sys.exc_info()[0]" to support 2.4 through 3.2 in the same script. A little annoying, but not as pretty as either just-one-way canonical syntax.
As for shell, we found out that BSD sed and GNU sed don't support compatible -i flags. BSD requires a suffix, GNU requires there be no space if one is given, which BSD rejects. Using manual .bak files feels worse than either by a long shot. I think the call has been replaced by awk instead now.
In my experience, GNUisms tend to be harder to work around than Python incompatibilities. That's why I try to avoid them in my shell scripts. Unfortunately, sed -i is very convenient and sponge just isn't common enough, but this is slowly being trained out of my fingers when I'm in "portable" mode (I use every trick I can at the prompt, just not when writing .sh files).
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