Linux4One/Ubuntu - shell problem

I write this in the hope of saving someone a bit of time.

I needed to write a shell script to do some stuff, nothing very complicated just a bit of automation.

When I'd done the damned thing wouldn't run, I was getting a basic syntax error on line 1 of the script. There was nothing wrong with line 1, or any of the script that I could see but it just wouldn't run. In desperation I wrote a three line "Hello world" script to prove my sanity and that wouldn't run either!

Having been a Unix user 20 odd years ago I'm used to running shell scripts by typing sh script.sh

After a lot of digging around I discovered that if I typed bash script.sh it worked fine! My problem was with a symbolic link in the /bin directory on the sh entry. Instead of the sym link pointing to /bin/bash it was pointing to /bin/dash :!:

Replacing the sym link with the correct one fixed my problem. A bit of searching seems to indicate that this is a know Ubuntu/Linux4One issue.

I have no idea if this will be useful to anyone else but hey ho.

Nick

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian_Almquist_shell

--Japser.