Why More is Not Always Good in Terms of Software - Words on Cross Platform Utilities, Bash-ism, and POSIX Compliance.

Link: https://minimalistbook.com/technical/why_more_is_not_always_good/

A new article is out in The Minimalist Book touching on a crucial topic related to software compliance on Unix Based Operating Systems. In this article, you will understand POSIX Compliance, Cross-Platform tools having the same name but different usage, and especially, Bash-ism.

Topics Covered:

• What I am Specifically Talking About?

• Example of Bash-ism

• GNU SED vs BSD SED

• Problems Created by Non-Compliant Software

• My Opinion on Software Compliance

Non-compliant tools are causing the learning curve for new Linux users to become steeper. I believe that sometime in the past, you were a beginner too and a lot of times, scripts written for one platform wouldn’t work on another even if the environment looked similar, but somehow they used to crash. I hope eventually you find out the reason, but if not, this article is enough to make you understand the issue.

This article will help you in practical life while you work with Linux and BSD while writing shell scripts and using various tools in them. Also, I have included my solution to avoid this breaking of shell scripts on different environments. For this one, I had to do a lot of research on the topic and try out my solutions on my systems before I wrote them.