mkropat / is-shell-portable Goto Github PK

Various commands like stat and readlink have different capabilities on different platforms. It would be great if the site was able to have per-command tables.

There's already a table showing if a given shell is available as a command, but it would be great to add a table that showed which specific version of a shell is installed, since, for example, there's a big difference between Bash v3 and Bash v4.

It'd also be useful to know what versions of other software is installed on the system, although distrowatch.com already does that, to an extent.

Add a new table that shows the value of different environment variables across platforms. The table cell could contain the actual value of the environment variable in the "stock" environment.

Some examples of variables that would be useful to survey:

• $SHELL
• $HOME
• $TMP
• $TMPDIR
• $USER

Add a new table that shows whether certain special paths exist on different platforms. For example:

• /dev/null
• /dev/urandom
• /proc
• /usr/bin/env

Right now the table simply surveys the capabilities of /bin/sh on different platforms. Instead of showing the capabilities across platforms, it would be great to see the capabilities across different shells (and versions). That info, in conjunction with the info in #4, would let the developer know of all the functionality that was available on their platforms of interest that might not necessarily be available in /bin/sh.

The shell capability tables wouldn't need to list whether all commands are available (the existing tables already show that), but instead it could focus on things like whether certain shell built-ins were available.

There's no reason the commands in the left-most column of the table can't link directly to the relevant documentation.

• POSIX commands: https://github.com/rtomayko/shellhaters.org/blob/gh-pages/index.html
• Others: perhaps http://ss64.com/bash/ ?