Re: Specifying which shell to use

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Hello Dan,

* Dan Smithers wrote on Thu, Oct 08, 2009 at 05:22:56PM CEST:
> Is there a way of specifying the shell to ues when running the configure
> scripts?

At configure run time?  Read `info Autoconf --index CONFIG_SHELL'.

> I see that the default configure begins
> 
> #! /bin/sh
> 
> that specifies to use sh.
> 
> On my Ubuntu system, this is a link to /bin/dash.

Which shouldn't be a big problem.  configure has machinery to either
cope with shells, or try to find a better one and use that.

> If I edit configure by hand to start
> 
> #! /bin/bash
> 
> it works. If I leave it pointing to dash it fails to execute the code
> generated by the intel compiler (icpc).

Can you please be more specific here?  Show a small configure.ac script
that fails, and how it fails, copy and pasting the commands and error
messages?  Things should work just fine with icpc.

Or is it that some of the code that you wrote yourself, not coming from
Autoconf, doesn't cope with dash?  In that case, the first
recommendation is the one you heard from the others: write portable
code.  If absolutely impossible, there also exists a (currently internal
only) API to specify tests that the shell in use must pass in order to
be eligible.  We could make a public API  to _AS_DETECT_REQUIRED, if
it's deemed safe enough to use.

Thanks,
Ralf