Re: how does qx select a "/bin/sh equivalent"?

[ikegami]

To see what Perl uses,

$ perl -le'use Config; print $Config{sh}'
/bin/sh

But note that on many systems, /bin/sh is bash.

$ /bin/sh -c 'echo $SHELL'
/bin/bash

If you want to use an alternate shell,

sub backticks_mysh {
  open(my $pipe, '-|', '/bin/mysh', '-c', $_[0])
     or return;
  local $/ = wantarray ? $/ : undef;
  <$pipe>
}

[gnujsa]

Ok, it was some time ago, but I do not think that the $SHELL variable is reliable. look at my

$ /bin/sh -c 'echo $SHELL'
/bin/bash

although:

$ file /bin/sh
/bin/sh: symbolic link to `dash'

and,

$ file /bin/dash
/bin/dash: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, Intel 80386, version 1 (SYSV), d
+ynamically linked (uses shared libs), for GNU/Linux 2.6.26, BuildID[s
+ha1]=0x890a514bd261794a6d39da58ea2372fdf48e98d6, stripped

I don't really know why. Maybe DASH keeps the environment of the calling shell, but I do not trust $SHELL.

[ikegami]

I used $SHELL to demonstrate that /bin/sh is not always the bourne shell. I don't see how your reply relates.