On Fri, 24 Feb 2017, Austin English wrote: [...]
Actually we use backticks everywhere because that was necessary for Solaris.
Seriously? Is that still the case / what version of Solaris was that, if you remember?
Solaris seems to never upgrade the core utilities, so any version I'd guess. But I haven't touched Solaris in a while (fortunately ;-)
Francois, do you know if this still an issue?
I don't run Solaris much either. Still have my Solaris 11.11 VM though. I ran the following script on it:
$ cat >foo <<EOF b=`which nproc` echo "b=[$b]"
p=$(which nproc) echo "p=[$p]" EOF
$ /bin/sh foo b=[/usr/bin/nproc] p=[/usr/bin/nproc] $ /bin/sh --version | head -n 1 GNU bash, version 4.1.9(1)-release (i386-pc-solaris2.11)
$ /bin/ksh foo b=[/usr/bin/nproc] p=[/usr/bin/nproc] $ /bin/ksh --version version sh (AT&T Research) 93u 2011-02-08
So it seems to work.
That said if the rest of the code does it one way and the new way does not bring a significant improvement I see no reason to stray from existing practices.