Re: Solaris 10: Catching errors of builtin "cd" command in "/bin/sh"

On 7/26/25 12:32, Farblos wrote:
> Hi list,
> 
> not sure whether I'm seeing pink elephants here, or whether this is
> already documented somewhere in the autoconf manual.
> 
> TL;DR I have on Solaris 10:
> 
>    # "echo foo" not executed in case of failure?!
>    $ cd /foo || echo foo
>    /foo: does not exist

You're not imagining it, /bin/sh on Solaris 10 is an ancient copy of
the Bourne shell (I believe from SVR4, but possibly older, definitely
pre-POSIX.1-1988), and it is known to stop executing commands when cd fails.
A very old bug in the Solaris bug database, originally filed in 1994 against
both SunOS 4.1.3_U1 and Solaris 2.3 claims that this is intentional behavior:

    This is the historic behaviour of the Bourne shell if built-in commands
    ("cd", ".") fail. This was intended to prevent damage in simple-minded
    shell scripts:

        # simple script
        cd /tmp
        rm -rf *

    In the script above, all data of the current directory will be removed
    if the initial "cd" fails. The Bourne shell /bin/sh will not
    execute "rm -rf *", but the newer KornShell /bin/ksh will.

and thus it was decided not to change it, and to recommend scripts call
test -d first to protect against it.

> Solaris 11 (tested on i86pc, not SPARC, though) behaves as expected
> with respect to this.

/bin/sh on Solaris 11 is ksh93, not the Bourne shell.
(The Bourne shell may be installed as /usr/sunos/bin/sh if the admin
  installed the optional package containing it.)

-- 
         -Alan Coopersmith-                 [email protected]
          Oracle Solaris Engineering - https://blogs.oracle.com/solaris