Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi,

Our Red Hat Linux machines, unlike Solaris, do not have the banner command. I am not the SA for these machines and the SA refuses to put in banner. Not sure what is his main objection to it, but he just flatly say no, end of story.

I am using banner as a quick way of identifying the progress run of the script.

Does anyone know of any ksh or Perl script that I can use in place of banner? If not, does anyone have a trick of maybe putting in a progress identifier on your scripts especially if it is a script that runs for awhile, you would want to know which part or sub of the script is it running on at some specific point in time.

Any advice will be much appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Here is an interesting shell implementation of banner that works with KSH93 and BASH. I hope this will help.

The sysadmin's objection is that banner is not part of the POSIX standard. He should explain that to you so get why. Rather than just 'no'.

Banner does not do anything really useful and from the UNIX getgo there were two totally different versions, so POSIX adopted neither one.

In a sense the admin is doing you a favor. Your code cannot port reliably with banner in it. You may not get why this is important until you've been in the IT world for a while. And have done system migration. Then when half of your scripts break because of banner, 'who am i' vs 'whoami', bdf vs df or non-POSIX versions of awk (the worst) you will get the message.