What is very sucky about shells these days is that bash is not fully compatible with sh and yet some linux distributions change /bin/sh to be a bash shell instead of leaving it alone to be sh.
i.e. a script that is written for sh and even explicitly requests that /bin/sh be used, may fail to work when /bin/sh has been changed to be a bash shell.
This makes it really tough to write sh or bash scripts that "just work" across most operating systems, since you can't depend on /bin/sh being sh and you can't depend on /bin/bash existing (some os's don't have bash in /bin)
westfw:
(does anyone actually write their own shell .init file any more?
I do... 
BTW, Steve Bourne (author of the Bourne shell) and his son Peter worked for the company I started back in the 90's.
I really liked Steve, really nice & smart guy.
Funny story, when Peter started, he was like a surfer dude. I remember when it started getting cold in Dallas, around nov/december, and he said "Man, its getting cold, I'm going to have to buy some shoes". (he wore sandals all the time)
--- bill