GNU Autoconf, Automake, and Libtool
by Gary V. Vaughan, Ben Elliston, Tom Tromey, Ian Lance Taylor
21.1. Why Use the Bourne Shell?
Unix has been around for more than 30 years and has splintered into hundreds of small and not-so-small variants (see Section 1.1, "The Diversity of Unix Systems" ). Much of the subject matter of this book is concerned with how best to approach writing programs that will work on as many of these variants as possible. One of the few programming tools absolutely guaranteed to be present on every flavor of Unix in use today is Steve Bourne's original shell, sh— the Bourne shell. That is why Libtool is written as a Bourne shell script, and why the configure files generated by Autoconf are Bourne shell scripts: They can be executed on all known Unix flavors, and as a bonus on most POSIX-based non-Unix operating systems ...
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