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Author Topic: where did bash go?  (Read 2074 times)

Offline fidolo

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where did bash go?
« on: April 07, 2012, 06:42:13 PM »
First I have to say that I am delighted with TC:   The hard drive in my old laptop died, and add the drives today are SATA, so they won't plug into the old mini-IDE socket, and it started to look like a dead drive meant a dead laptop!     Luckily I found an adaptor of the same size as the 2.5" drive, which interfaces a flash card to the mini-IDE, (these things are still out there, apparently increasingly hard to find), and now my laptop runs faster than ever with tiny core on the 4GB fast flash card, a real delight!

My question is about bash having mysteriously disappeared from my system.   After installing a few packages I added some of my own scripts, with the #!/bin/bash shebang, and they were all working fine.   After removing some of the packages, the scripts did not work anymore, until I changed the shebang to #!/bin/sh.   Did I make some mistake that would have disturbed other things beyond the shell?   What made bash go away in the first place?

Offline Rich

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Re: where did bash go?
« Reply #1 on: April 07, 2012, 06:56:49 PM »
Hi fidolo
When removing applications, AppsAudit is the correct tool to use. However, it pays to look at what dependencies
it is removing. If you removed an app that depended on bash.tcz, and none of the other installed apps depends
on it, bash is removed. Even though bash can be used by itself, AppsBrowser doesn't know that.
If you don't need something that is specific to bash, ash is built in.

Offline fidolo

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Re: where did bash go?
« Reply #2 on: April 07, 2012, 09:54:15 PM »
Thank you Rich.   I can see now that bash is optional, and I probably won't miss it since busybox seems to do everything I'm likely to need.

Offline tinypoodle

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Re: where did bash go?
« Reply #3 on: April 07, 2012, 10:44:33 PM »
After removing some of the packages, the scripts did not work anymore, until I changed the shebang to #!/bin/sh.
If they run fine after that, it is most likely the header was wrong in the first place.   ;)
"Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster." Niklaus Wirth - A Plea for Lean Software (1995)

Offline fidolo

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Re: where did bash go?
« Reply #4 on: April 08, 2012, 01:22:37 AM »
Thanks.  That's precisely what it turned out to be.   After bash was removed as a dependency of some uninstalled package, the scripts no longer request an available shell.  I just did not know that a linux OS could possibly run without bash.   Playing with TC, I learn more than I had before, using the big linuces.   :)