[Rd] What version is sh?

[Duncan Murdoch]

On Mon, 29 Dec 2003 14:40:45 -0500, I wrote:

>I'm trying to write an automatic check of the toolset installation for
>R.  It'll get all the tools to print their version numbers, and
>complain if they aren't acceptable ones.
>
>However, I can't see how to get sh to print version information.  Is
>there some way to do it?
>
>The sh I'm worried about is the one that comes with Cygwin, if there
>isn't a standard approach.

Several people suggested the GNU standard "--version" command line
option, which works for most of the Cygwin utilities, but not this
one.  Dirk Eddelbeuttel said

>I'd suspect that it is one of the small shells which e.g. Debian calls them
>ash and dash; these are used on boot floppies and the like where space is at
>a premium.  As a consequence, they may not support all full-blown
>command-line options. So to test the shell, you may need to run a small
>shell script containing the features you want to make use of later.

I think it must be one of those.  The executable is about 1/8 the size
of the bash executable.

Duncan Murdoch