Re: gzip-1.3.10 test failures

[Matthew Woehlke]

Nelson H. F. Beebe wrote:
> On 28-Dec-2006, I successfully built, validated, and installed
> gzip-1.3.9 on 20+ flavors of Unix in our local test lab.

I think I want your lab! :-) (I have access to a pretty wide range of 
systems, but even counting major OS versions separately, I don't know if 
I have 20.)

> Today, I attempted to repeat this success with the new gzip-1.3.10,
> but got failures like this on Sun Solaris 7 SPARC, SGI IRIX MIPS, DEC
> Alpha OSF/1 systems:
>
>         ./zdiff -c gzip.doc.gz gzip.doc.gz
>         diff: /dev/fd/3: Bad file number
>
> The problem in each case is that the script begins with "#!/bin/bash",
> but /bin/bash does not exist on two of those systems.  The fallback
> /bin/sh that is called to run the script does not understand /dev/fd/
> devices.  On the other system, Solaris 8, /bin/bash exists and is
> version 2.03, which is apparently too old to recognize /dev/fd.

Ooh, ouch, that'll bite me too. '#!/bin/bash' is *not* safe; please 
don't do that. :-) (If bash must be used to run these, I would say that 
finding one in $PATH is required.)

--
Matthew
"But I want to cast Magic Missile!"