Re: FreeTDS on Debian: connect to MSSQL with ODBC fails

On Thu, Dec 02, 2010 at 11:30:20AM -0500, [email protected] wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 02, 2010 at 10:26:24AM -0500, Peter C. Norton wrote:
> > On Thu, Dec 02, 2010 at 09:55:32AM -0500, [email protected] wrote:
> > > It's trickier than it might look to do correctly.  For example, isql will 
> > > not report where it looks for its odbc.ini.  So the osql script tries to 
> > > infer that by searching the binary and parsing ldd(1) output.  And then 
> > > there are the usual portability issues, such as the versions of sed(1) 
> > > and awk(1), and the options they accept.  But after 11 tries we seem to 
> > > be making some progress!
> > 
> > Quick note about the script: if you're on a platform with
> > ksh/bash/zsh, can you have autoconf/configure replace #!/bin/sh with
> > the more capable shell?  On unix variants that have a true bourne
> > shell, a lot of things don't work as expected with /bin/sh.
> 
> Ah, well, Peter, we're missing one critical resource: a more capable scripter.  
> 
> Yours truly can stumble through a Bourne shell script but I've never dealt with ksh or zsh.  I use bash interactively and try to color inside the lines such that bash invoked as /bin/sh behaves identically to any Bourne shell.  So far that's worked OK: the problems we've had with osql were never shell problems per se, but BSD/Linux utility conflicts or unexpected unixODBC arrangements.  
> 

Ah, the joys of shell scripting.  Solaris has traditionally insisted
on keeping a less-than-capable /bin/sh as the default (it was one of
the few statically linked binaries in solaris, so recovery can be done
in the miniroot.  These days, in solaris 10 there's a /bin/bash.
Other unix vendors have variations on this theme.

Most of the bash syntax and idioms that people use are actually from
ksh (~, $(), ${parameter:-word}, more complex parameter expansion like
${parameter:=word}, command-line editing, aliases, etc.) but ksh also
does a lot of things more consistently.  Some examples are that many
/bin/sh implementations don't work properly with [ -z $var ] (test is
not a built-in, so this usage fails, and then you have to rely on the
features of the platform-specific test(1)) leading to the ugly but
necessary idiom of [ "x" != "x$VAR" ] you may have seen, etc.

Anyway, currently if you code for bash, maybe you can look for bash in
configure and m4/auto* put it in the #! line explicitly so that osql
will work properly on different *nix's with less work.  

-Peter