Hi all,

I'm running slackware-current and building a livecd from it. Trying to spare some memory and speed up the boot, I made /bin/sh point to /bin/ash. Upon reboot I noticed an error for rc.udev :
Except for this script, all others can run with ash.

I can make my slackware with udev, hal and all others boot in 20 seconds or so on my *laptop* and most of this time is caused by the kernel or a few commands so using ash wouldn't speed things much anyway.

However this makes me curious : do many people use, or would like to use, ash for their startup script ?

Thanks.

Slackware requires bash as the shell for startup scripts.

Eric

I've been using ash as /bin/sh for about a year (runnings 11.0), however I don't use udev. But I don't think it would be all that hard to replace the bash-magic with some sed/awk/whatever if you really would want to use ash. IIRC rc.inet1 also uses some of that bash substitution, that could have been removed in -current since you didn't have any problems except for udev.
But in general I would advice against ash as /bin/sh, there seem to be a lot of scripts floating around assuming that /bin/sh is bash. If you don't want to manually read all the scripts in your system making sure they are ash compatible you might be in for a nasty surprise, and lots of debugging, when some yearly cronjob bails out in a couple of months or so. And what you gain isn't really worth the hassle..

This was mere meant as a test and was solely motivated by curiosity. At that time I was playing with bootchart.

I did not intend to use ash as sh for everything as I knew some things would break but changing the symbolic link was the fastest and easiest way to check whether replacing sh would still give me a working system or not. I intended to revert it as soon as the system was up again and only change the boot scripts. I've stopped before that though.

As for rc.inet, I have to say I don't know because I don't use it anymore : one day after a fresh slackware install I've been too lazy to reconfigure the network (this shows how lazy I am ;p ) and created rather a new script in my home which I could run with "./n<TAB><TAB>". :P