Cross-platform bash: Need an easy framework.

1clue · Advocate Joined: 05 Feb 2006 Posts: 2569

Hi,

For some years now I've been storing my personal preferences like aliases and utility scripts in an git, because I manage a bunch of servers and it's very difficult to manage without an scm.

Now I'm using Linux of various flavors (have been for years, not really a problem) as well as Mac OS X and Solaris, and Windows with Cygwin.

The problem is that while commands usually have the same name, the options almost never do across platforms.

So I'm trying to come up with a cross-platform configuration initializer.

Here's what I know:

I want to add a single line to my .bashrc or .bash_profile or whatever the default for the OS is, and have everything managed from there.
I want an alias to perform the same way (or as close as possible) on all platforms. For example, alias psg='ps axf | grep' on Linux, but the options are different on Solaris or Mac.
name.sh would be the dafault file, name.Darwin or name.Whatever would be for Mac or Whatever.
I manage far more Linux boxes than anything else, and sometimes the box has a gnu/linux version of a command and I want to use it even if it's nonstandard on that platform.
I think I need an 'atom' for each alias or script, so I'll need an alias directory, and possibly a bin directory for each platform and a 'default' directory.

Anyway, what I'm thinking of is this:

I need some sort of core detector that checks what platform I'm on and sets things up the correct way. I want each 'atom' of configuration to be as simple as possible, and have the core engine be where any necessary complexity is.

I'd like to know if anyone else is doing something like this, and maybe use that instead of trying to roll my own.

Failing that, I'd like to set up a framework and maybe publish it for others.

steveL · Posted: Fri Sep 26, 2014 2:03 am Post subject:

That sounds awfully complicated; I'd use a case on $(uname -s)

1clue · Advocate Joined: 05 Feb 2006 Posts: 2569

You mean on each atom? I suppose that could work. Then I'd only need one directory for files to pull in.

Thanks.

Ottre · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 23 Dec 2012 Posts: 129

steveL · Posted: Fri Sep 26, 2014 5:16 pm Post subject:

1clue · Advocate Joined: 05 Feb 2006 Posts: 2569

uname -s:

Mac OS X gives Darwin and solaris, at least the boxes I'm working with now, say something like SunOS. Cygwin is CygWin. The Sun boxes belong to a customer and they're pretty fussy about people just randomly logging on without a specific need. I'll check next time I have a reason to be on.

I've started on this, and it's actually turning out to be both simpler and more complicated than I had anticipated. There's no error handling right now so it's a bit of a house of cards, but you suck it into the user's environment with one line: