UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users

A couple of remarks / additions:
In ksh88, yes but in ksh93 arrays can also be set like VAR=( a b c d e f )
The order is not reversed. In most Bourne derived shells both LHS and RHS end up in a subshell. In ksh the RHS ends up in the local shell. Bash 4 also has an option to accomplish this.. The POSIX specification allows for both types of behavior.
ksh93 does, ksh88 does not.
What is meant with "strict sh" code. I would say best is to stick with what is the POSIX shell specification and on most modern Unix/Linux systems /bin/sh is compliant with these specifications (except Solaris <=10 where /bin/sh is a strict pre-POSIX Bourne shell and the POSIX compliant shell is /usr/xpg4/bin/sh, or mostly compliant on some Linux distributions). The POSIX shell is more ksh derived than Bourne shell derived (although ksh is mostly Bourne shell derived itself and ksh88 itself is not POSIX compliant, but ksh93 is).

Yes, by vanilla sh I didn't necessarily mean POSIX. There are some old shells out there.

I understand your rant but don't confuse craziness to choice.

Solaris default PATH (/usr/bin) is providing commands that do not break scripts when the OS is upgraded. This compatibility is not there to bother users but on the opposite a strong expectation from most customers and software developers.

When Solaris 2.x was launched, many users that were used to SunOS 4.x BSD syntax were confused. To avoid the break in their habits, they just had to prepend /usr/ucb (University of California at Berkeley) to their path to get a BSDish CLI environment.

Similarily, if you expect commands to behave the GNU (i.e. Linux) way, you can now set your PATH to have /usr/gnu/bin first. This is even the default, along with bash as login shell, for regular users with Solaris 11.

If on the other hand, you don't want the traditional Solaris behavior but a POSIX, standard conformant one, just have /usr/xpg4/bin first in your PATH.

Finally, many commands located in /usr/bin have been enhanced to support widely accepted still non standard options so your statement is much less valid with Solaris 11.

I second a plus vote for the no-break concept of the Solaris approach. It is what VMS (OpenVMS) was also famous for. You could copy a binary from VMS 2.1 to VMS 6.0 and it ran correctly. Ditto an old SPARCn binary on a SPARCn+m architecture.

Solaris system startup scripts from a long time ago still work as designed. SMF and some other changes have obviated the existence of a lot of them.

Solaris 11 has a slightly different feel, especially with regard to where shells and standard commands reside. Early on stuff like GNU coreutils was likely to be in /usr/local bin. Then the GNU coreutils official next move was to /usr/sfw/bin, now their most recent home is /usr/gnu/bin.

No big deal unless run a lot of different Solaris OSes. So when you are root and then you su, you have to be careful to get the right awk: nawk, awk, or gawk depending on app owners individual profiles. And Solaris version. Wrong awk may give you some surprises.. tr also does that.

The one command that causes the most turmoil on the forums is date. For one: Solaris /usr/bin/date does not support the %s epoch seconds format specifier. People post GNU date math answers not knowing the issues standard Solaris date causes for uninformed forum readers. nawk vs awk is another problem for readers.

I grow old on bash
I use it all the time... actually didn't even bother to check others out!

The one that I'm using at the time!

Stay young with zsh!
zsh is powerful and fast and safe.
I see that SuSE 11 SP3 has added support for a zsh login shell.
Could a moderator please add /bin/zsh to the voting list?