But it won't run many of the scripts that come with Red Hat or Slackware ---
I've tried it. They both assume that /bin/sh is bash in all its g(l)ory.
(Then again, I once tried making /bin/sh ksh on an SCO box to see what would
happen and promptly discovered that many of SCO's scripts still used '^' to
build pipelines. Go figure. :-)
| Oh - they are for me to, but in total, I doubt I would spend more
| that 0.5% of my CPU time running them compared to a squid or
| somesuch.
+--->8
I spend a bit more than that on scripts that do a lot of forking ---
configure scripts, build scripts, various administration scripts that use sh
rather than assume Perl because they need to run on 9 different platforms
before our Perl has been installed, etc.
Here's a thought in that direction: how many things on Linux are Perl or
Python, etc., scripts not because they need Perl/Python/etc. features but
simply to avoid the overhead of fork()/exec() for everything they do? I
know I've done that quite often.
| For me, a 10% speed increase in network IO or disk IO compared to a
| 300% increase in running ./configure is more worth while.
+--->8
You might be surprised just how often fork() is used and how much wall time
is consumed by it, except possibly on install-and-forget database servers.
(I bet web servers get hammered by fork() latency, though.)
-- brandon s. allbery [os/2][linux][solaris][japh] allbery@kf8nh.apk.net system administrator [WAY too many hats] allbery@ece.cmu.edu electrical and computer engineering KF8NH carnegie mellon university
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