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Comment by hiAndrewQuinn | Hacker News Reader

Having recently started to experiment a lot with the BSDs (mostly Free, a little Open), which often don't come with even Bash out of the box (usually still Perl though), I can definitely relate to this. The more complex your workplace's OS ecosystem, the harder it gets to write anything which will truly run everywhere, unless you go all the way down to POSIX shell.

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Yep.

I assume everyone already knows that, but shellcheck is great help if you need to go all the way down to POSIX since it will detect /bin/sh shebang and warn about any non-compatible bash-ism.

Where does the expectation come from that Bash should come ootb with BSD? Or anywhere else outside of mainstream Linux distributions with GNU userland? Bash is the standard Bourne/Korn-like shell for the GNU project, which was envisioned as a FSF Unix clone/replacement. BSD and other Unix-like systems pretty much always had their own separate userland, with often different syntax than the GNU tools.

I think the odd one out was really Apple, which ran Bash as the standard shell for many years (a choice they probably regret), while most the rest of the userland was largely from BSD.

No one says it's an expectation or an obligation. It's a matter of fact: there's no bash and it is obviously inconvenient for people used to bash, that's it.

Have you tried cfengine ? I'd be curious of the feedback in heterogeneous environments.

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