1.3 csh/zsh caveat

AutoGen tries to use your normal shell so that you can supply shell code in a manner you are accustomed to using. If, however, you use csh or zsh, you cannot do this. Csh is sufficiently difficult to program that it is unsupported. Zsh, though largely programmable, also has some anomalies that make it incompatible with AutoGen usage. Therefore, when invoking AutoGen from these environments, you must be certain to set the SHELL environment variable to a Bourne-derived shell, e.g., sh, ksh or bash.

Any shell you choose for your own scripts need to follow these basic requirements:

1. It handles trap $sig ":" without output to standard out. This is done when the server shell is first started. If your shell does not handle this, then it may be able to by loading functions from its start up files.
2. At the beginning of each scriptlet, the command \\cd $PWD is inserted. This ensures that cd is not aliased to something peculiar and each scriptlet starts life in the execution directory.
3. At the end of each scriptlet, the command echo mumble is appended. The program you use as a shell must emit the single argument mumble on a line by itself.

This document was generated by Bruce Korb on September, 30 2006 using texi2html 1.76.