Me too. I only use constructs specified by POSIX in Shell Command Language. DrewDeVault elaborated why in his Introduction to POSIX shell. And i use shellcheck which also finds most of my mistakes.

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That was a very engaging rabbit hole. I am already aware of and frequently consult the POSIX standard, but I was not aware of the Almquist shell (ash/dash): a shell implementation that conforms closely to the POSIX standard, and is part of the Slackware distro. In fact the paragraph describing the Almquist shell for Slackware claims that ash is the shell used by the Slackware install disks.

Relinking /bin/sh to /bin/dash would probably break too many things, no matter how much I'm tempted.

Now I'm considering whether it would be fun to write a true Bourne clone, as such a thing apparently does not exist.

I get your point (especially if you intend to publish a shell utility), although I would prefer the bash way as it opens /etc/os-release only one time, I admit I generally prefer bash syntax over the shells I tried before

Didn't have to ... it's alive! https://slackbuilds.org/repository/1...m/heirloom-sh/

The fact that it works in bourne-like shells might not be enough to call it "shell-idependent". What about tcsh for example? Tcsh has a completely different syntax for setting environment variables.

regards Henrik

[t]csh was designed to be incompatible. This is like asking "what about PowerShell".