Techniques for Increasing Portability

There are two common techniques to increase the portability of a shell script between different versions of UNIX:

  • Conditional execution

  • Abstraction

Conditional execution alters the execution of a script based on the system type, whereas abstraction retains the same basic flow of the script by placing the conditional statements within functions.

Conditional Execution

A script that uses conditional execution for portability contains an if statement at the beginning that sets several variables indicating the set of commands to use on a particular platform. This section looks at two common cases in which conditional execution is used:

  • Determining the remote shell command

  • Determining the proper method of using the ...

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