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

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2016-02-15 07:56, lists at openmailbox.org wrote:
> 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.

The shells provided with the base system might be limited indeed. But 
adding additional shells is no mystery science.

*All* shells in NetBSD are dynamically linked, as is all other binaries 
as well. Static linked binaries disappeared many years ago by now. The 
one place you will find those are in /rescue. Same with FreeBSD and 
Linux. If you think you still have static linked binaries in /bin or 
/sbin, you are in for a surprise.

>> 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.

Yes. They will provide some default value, populated from a 
configuration file. So you can get whatever you want as defaults.
(And old stinkers like me edit /etc/passwd directly and do not use stuff 
like adduser)

>> 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.

And I'm telling they do not. Like I said, I do not use bash myself, and 
yet I do not hit any such problems. What are you doing?

By the way, I do agree that Linux developers usually are a crazy bunch 
of people with very little discipline, lousy coding standards, and a 
very unclear idea on how to do things. But the shell is usually not the 
problem.

And that said, a far more annoying detail is that they write #!/bin/sh, 
but then assume that it actually is bash. Which is true in Linux, but 
not in NetBSD for example, where sh actually is sh. That is a typical 
Linux messup.

But this all in the end just means bash needs to be installed. Not that 
you need to use bash yourself, but this is actually what you claimed you 
did (use bash as your shell because of it being the default in Linux, 
and programs breaking if you didn't use it)

	Johnny

-- 
Johnny Billquist                  || "I'm on a bus
                                   ||  on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt at softjar.se             ||  Reading murder books
pdp is alive!                     ||  tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol