It goes through all the commands and common versions of Unix and which flags are likely to work, etc.
Even that book admits there's a lot of folklore, because nobody has actually gone and tested things recently. Something as simple as safely writing with "echo" is a problem. You can argue that any script that uses echo $foo is incorrect (because $foo might be a flag). Conversely 'echo --' is supposed to print -- by POSIX.
The only people who are likely to even attempt this are people whose full-time job it is to write shell scripts, or the authors of tools like autoconf, which must generate portable shell. autoconf shell is a good example of the anachronisms and hoops you need to jump through to support this style.
Nobody else has time for that, because they have to spend their mental energy writing C and C++, not shell and make. So that's why we have pretty low standards for the quality of build systems. The tools aren't there to support writing a robust and easy-to-use build system.
There's no way to test that the commands you're running will actually work on someone else's machine, other than by "memorizing the manual".
I have an entire book on this:
https://www.amazon.com/Beginning-Portable-Shell-Scripting-Pr...
It goes through all the commands and common versions of Unix and which flags are likely to work, etc.
Even that book admits there's a lot of folklore, because nobody has actually gone and tested things recently. Something as simple as safely writing with "echo" is a problem. You can argue that any script that uses echo $foo is incorrect (because $foo might be a flag). Conversely 'echo --' is supposed to print -- by POSIX.
The only people who are likely to even attempt this are people whose full-time job it is to write shell scripts, or the authors of tools like autoconf, which must generate portable shell. autoconf shell is a good example of the anachronisms and hoops you need to jump through to support this style.
Nobody else has time for that, because they have to spend their mental energy writing C and C++, not shell and make. So that's why we have pretty low standards for the quality of build systems. The tools aren't there to support writing a robust and easy-to-use build system.