Shell – How to Test for POSIX Compliance of Shell Scripts

posixshellshell-script

Considering that POSIX is the closest thing to a common standard among all unices, I'm interested in knowing if there's a shell that supports it exclusively. While most modern shells provide support for POSIX (and will run POSIX compliant scripts without any problem), they don't do a good job at pointing out non compliant features.

Is there any shell that implements POSIX and POSIX only, in such a way that it'd throw an error for any non compliant feature?

EDIT I want to clarify that I'm not asking for general tips for writing portable shell scripts. The related question mentionned in the comments already covered this. I thought of this question when I found out that bash has a --posix option but only to discover that it only affects some intialization behaviors which is not exactly what I'm looking for.

Best Answer

Unfortunately, 'portable' is usually a stronger requirement than 'POSIX-compliant' for shell scripts. That is, writing something that runs on any POSIX shell isn't too hard, but getting it to run on any real-world shell is harder.

You can start by installing every shell in your package manager, in particular debian's posh sounds like what you want (Policy-compliant Ordinary SHell). Debian's policy is POSIX with a few exceptions (echo -n specified, local...).

Beyond that though, testing has to cover a few shells (/bin/sh especially) on a range of platforms. I test on Solaris (/bin/sh and xpg4/sh), and BSD. AIX and HP-UX are very compliant and don't cause problems. bash is a little world of its own.

I'd recommend the Autoconf guide to portable shell, which is absolutely brilliant and saves a lot of time. Large chunks of it are obsolete, but that's OK; just skip TruUnix and Ultrix and so on if you don't care!

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