Note to jules, who observed that Solaris users seem to dislike bash because it's not installed by default:

I discovered, much to my surprise, that bash is installed by default on Solaris 2.8. I was mucking around with my PATH the other day, and I took all the GNU stuff out (why, I don't remember), thinking that at my next login my shell would fall back to csh. But it didn't. I then discovered that bash resides in /usr/bin/bash. This was on a Sparc Ultra 10, right out of the box, default OS install, and still had that "new computer" smell.

Once I worked with a fellow who would have used bash as his shell, but the OS, via chsh(1), wouldn't allow it as a logon shell. He was a sharp guy, but he didn't try very hard to solve this one. It's pretty easy to make bash your default shell even on an uncooperative OS like Solaris using a bit of script like the following in your login script:

  export SHELL=/usr/local/bin/bash
  if [ -x $SHELL ]; then
    exec env SHELL=$SHELL $SHELL -login
  fi

The "env" in there is hanging around from when I used this snippet with csh. I changed the "if" syntax, but left the env. In ksh, I guess this would be simpler as "SHELL=$SHELL exec $SHELL -login".

I digress. To get back to the point, bash is available on newer Sun systems. Don't remember about less, but I do seem to remember gzip being on my new sun too. Even if bash weren't installed by default, what's the problem with building it? I've never had a problem with bash in six or seven years of use; "./configure; make" has always worked just fine for me.