[Wine] Script to run Wine and save log

[Martin Gregorie]

On Sat, 2009-06-27 at 15:39 -0700, perryh at pluto.rain.com wrote:
> > > All SUS-complaint unixes have a /bin/sh ...  It ussualy run
> > > Bourne-scripts, but might support various extensions which
> > > may not work in other shells.
> ...
> > I take your point about non-standard extensions, but the way
> > round that is to stick to the original Bourne shell syntax and
> > not use the extensions.
> 
> Which is all well and good, provided one is aware of what
> is and is not an extension.  Absent a true Bourne shell for
> testing, extensions may easily turn up in a script that was
> intended to be portable.

Nobody said its easy, but its not hard either. There are ways to get a
decent handle on a portable shell scripting subset:

- stick to the syntax in short get-you-going books like
  "Unix in a Nutshell" (O'Reilly) which clearly distinguishes 
  the syntax used by the UNIX SVR4 Bourn shell from ksh syntax.
  At least my copy does.

- compile and install the Heirloom Bourn Shell, available
  from SourceForge. It is specifically designed for portable
  script testing.

- if you can't use those approaches, simply avoid everything except
  basic features. Restricting yourself to the following may be overkill
  but should do the job:
  - use if..then..fi instead of defaulted assignments and
    case...esac constructs
  - avoid function declarations - you can always call another script
  - use only the most basic for loop: for f in $* do...done
  - use expr for all calculation and regex matching, not fancy
    assignments
  - stick to the simple conditions: -s -z -f -r -eq -ne < > !
  - be prepared to recode anything that's even slightly complex
    if it gets complaints.

This isn't made easy by the way 'compatibility' is maintained by various
Unices and Linuxes - in Fedora (and probably most current
Linuxes) /bin/sh is a hard link to /bin/bash so installing the Heirloom
Bourn Shell is probably the way to go.


Martin