So I was trying to create a script on bash shell, I came to know that the script doesn’t run on ksh or dash shells. So my question is how you make a script to run on all 3 (bash, dash & ksh) shells.
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Answer
In order to write a script that is guaranteed to be portable between the various shells, the script must be POSIX Shell compliant. POSIX is a minimum set of builtins and commands that all conforming shells must support. Ash, Dash, Zsh, Bash, Ksh, etc.. are all shells capable of running scripts that are POSIX compliant.
What shells like Bash do is add nice features which make the shell more capable, like additional parameter expansions for conversion to upper/lower case, substring replacement, etc.. and new builtins like [[ ... ]]
that provide regex matching capabilities, etc.. While this makes Bash more capable, it also means scripts written using “Bashisms” are no longer able to run under all other shells. Ash, Dash and other minimal shells have no idea how to handle the features added by Bash, Ksh or Zsh and therefore fail.
To write truly portable scripts, you must limit the content to that provided by the POSIX command language.