shell-compat-utils: Aids for Compatibility Testing of Scripts

This builds programs that can help with testing compatibility of scripts written on GNU/Linux systems with MacOS and BSD. The top-level Test script builds all code and adds symlinks to bin/ for each program with a name that reflects its version.

Programs

• bash3: Bash version 3.2.48, from the unofficial mirror Git repo commit f3b6bd19 ("Imported from ../bash-3.2.48.tar.gz.") This is probably similar to the latest version of Bash available on MacOS, which never upgraded to Bash 4.x but instead switched the default user shell to Zsh.

• apple/text_cmds/ supplies various BSD text-manipulation programs. According to the Apple OSS releases page, MacOS 10.12 (2016, "Sierra") uses the version tagged text_cmds-97, which is what we use here. The programs we build from this are:

  • sed: The MacOS version of sed. Installed in bin/macsed.

Zsh is not included in this repo because most systems already have a current version of Zsh. (On Debian, install this with apt install zsh.)

Installation

Building with ./Test will install the programs into the following directories in this repo:

• bin/: Programs with names distinguished from the standard system names, e.g. bash3 and macsed.
• macbin/: Programs with the standard system names on the given system, e.g. bash and sed.

Which bin/ directory you want to use depends on how you're doing your testing. bin/ is more convenient for checking a command invocation, and macbin/ is more convenient for checking a script that invokes other commands.

You have several options for using them:

1. In the project using these, add appropriate …/*bin directory to the path used by your test code.

2. For "global" access for your user, in ~/.local/bin/, symlink the program names to the programs in this project's bin/ directory, or simply copy bin/* to ~/.local/bin/.

3. For "global" access on the whole system, copy bin/* to /usr/local/bin/ (or similar), and ensure that the permissions are set so that the files are world-readable and -executable.

In the latter two cases you do not want to copy or symlink the contents of macbin/ as that will probably break normal scripts on your system.

Notes

Bash 3

The committed y.tab.* are buggy, so we touch parse.y to force them to be regnerated. That causes git status constantly to indicate that the files (or subodule) are changed, which is annoying so we mark them with git update-index --assume-unchanged to suppress this. Keep this in mind if you're forking of your own private version of Bash 3.