Ok, let us start with the easy part: the most basic thing you have to take care of is the difference between these systems: HP-UX has (IIRC) a Korn Shell as default shell, some Linux systems (sorry, Linux is not my strong side) have bash, others have even more obscure shells (i remember running into some dash awhile ago, whatever that is). Furthermore the exact composition of the default PATH variable may different, i.e /bin is sometimes a link to /usr/bin, sometimes not, etc.. My suggestion is to first create a large case-switch where you take care of these differences, like this sketch:

Code:

case $OPER_SYS in
     RHEL)
          export PATH=....
          export TERM=....   # in case you need it
          ....
 
     SUSE)
          export PATH=....
          export TERM=....   # in case you need it
          ....

     HPUX)
          export PATH=....
          export TERM=....   # in case you need it
          ....

esac

...rest of your "OS-independent" code here...

Notice that i.e. HP-UX has some peculiarities: the df command exists, but if you want an output that resembles what you would expect you have to use bdf. (This might not be relevant in your case, but there might be similar things that are.) Also notice that commands dealing with package management, user management, logical volumes and similar things are different in different platforms. You may need to create a function for these things which gets some parameters and then does OS-dependent things depending on the value of $OPER_SYS.

This - and similar problems with special characters - is a problem which IMHO cannot be fully solved in shell: shells always interpret in some way what they read. Masking/escaping character in your input will only get you that far. A real solution would be a parser, but it would have to be written in a HLL.

So, if you can narrow down a list of special characters you need to be able to cope with - starting with the newline - a (maybe not very pretty but workable) solution might be found, otherwise i suggest you implement your problem not in shell but in some high-level language.

I hope this helps.

bakunin