Re: sh location

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Hello Christian,

* Christian Csar wrote on Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 10:05:00PM CEST:
> So in writing test scripts, I happened to read the man page for sh, and
> in APPLICATION USAGE it mentions that
> "Applications should note that the standard PATH to the shell cannot be
> assumed to be either /bin/sh or /usr/bin/sh, and should be determined by
> interrogation of the PATH returned by getconf PATH , ensuring that the
> returned pathname is an absolute pathname and not a shell built-in."
> 
> Does automake provide a way to deal with this, or do modern systems
> primarily use only /bin/sh. This seems as if it could also be a problem
> with python or perl which might have more variable locations. I did not
> find anything about this in the manual, but I could have missed it.

The configure startup code provided by Autoconf searches for a better
shell if the one running is found to be not good enough.  The choice may
be overridden with CONFIG_SHELL, like this:
  CONFIG_SHELL=/bin/foosh /bin/foosh ./configure [OPTIONS...]

as documented in the INSTALL file.

Otherwise, the shell search will typically try bash or ksh, or use
/usr/xpg4/bin/sh.  The result of the shell search will be available in
the $SHELL variable and the @SHELL@ substitute.

Hope that helps.

Cheers,
Ralf