[Info-vax] CLI editing, was: Re: VMS - Virtual Terminals - A security risk way back yonder OR was that an Old Wives Tale ?

[lists at openmailbox.org]

On Sun, 14 Feb 2016 21:17:58 +0100
Johnny Billquist via Info-vax <info-vax at rbnsn.com> wrote:

> On 2016-02-14 19:42, lists at openmailbox.org wrote:
> > I know Johnny loves to argue so here's an example of UNIX with a
> > statically linked shell. Read it and weep, babe.
> 
> Oh, I love to argue. No denying that. I just have this inability to keep 
> quiet when I see something I think is wrong. :-)
> 
> By the way, I can build static binaries all day long. It's not hard.

And yet, many UNIX installs provide a limited selection of shells. If you
don't like any of those you're expected to compile your own with the build
framework the OS provides- be it NetBSD pkgsrc, FreeBSD ports, or use
precompiled binaries as in OpenBSD packages. Many if not most of those are
set up to produce dynamically linked binaries. Furthermore, most if not all
of those package management and build systems keep addons and anything
that isn't considered part of "base" in /usr/local or other filesystems
that won't necessarily be available in single user mode.

> But I still find the concept of a "default" shell a bit weird.

Nevertheless, many UNIX installs come with a very limited selection of
shells. When you useradd or go through various adduser scripts there are
indeed defaults for shell and many other things.

> I've never seen problems using whatever shell I personally prefer, no
> matter what shells were already installed or not, and they have never
> been in the way of installing whatever other software needed, so I find
> the claim that you stick to bash in Linux because of some problem just
> super weird.

Bad day to use google-translate? I never made such a claim. What I said
is many if not most Linux apps need bash to compile. Autotools, configure
scripts, and other build pieces for Linux apps often break with a shell
other than bash. Of course this is not because bash is so wonderful. It is
because most Linux developers don't realize there is anything outside of
Linux so they use bash extensions and gcc extensions etc. and write mostly
non-portable code and scripts.