Beginning Portable Shell Scripting: From Novice to Professional

CHAPTER 9Bringing It All Together

So far, this book has focused mostly on technical details of the portability of the shell. Good portable code, however, requires additional skills. It is impossible to successfully test on everything; sooner or later, a script you write will be used on a system that didn't even exist when you wrote it. New standards will come out, new extensions will be defined, and new bugs will sneak into production releases. This chapter discusses some of the ways in which you can write scripts that are more likely to survive new systems.

It is not usually enough to have a script that will run on the existing systems you are targeting. Furthermore, it may not be enough to have a script that runs everywhere. If your script ...