22.2 Implementation

By their very nature, a sizeable part of the functionality of shell scripts, is provided by the many utility programs that they routinely call to perform important subsidiary tasks. Addressing the portability of the script involves issues of portability in the host operating system environment, and portability of the utility programs as well as the portability of the shell implementation itself.

This section discusses differences between shell implementations to which you must cater when writing a portable script. It is broken into several subsections, each covering a single aspect of shell programming that needs to be approached carefully to avoid pitfalls with unexpected behaviour in some shell implementations. The following section discusses how to cope with the host environment in a portable fashion. The last section in this chapter addresses the portability of common shell utilities.