[tex-live] TeXLive-CD/DVD (Installation)

[Karl Berry]

    There are too many shells with different syntax. 

Please don't spread FUD.  

It is quite plausible to write shell scripts that run on every Unixish
system, including working around BSD-isms :).  There are many extant
examples.  A lot of effort has been expended to do that with the TL
install scripts.  There are no known "bash-isms", etc.  GNU tar is not
required, either.

To get back to the facts, what you reported to me is that the script
hung waiting for input in a simple tar pipeline:
tar -c -f - -I /list/of/files | (cd dest && tar -x -f -)

This is unlikely to have anything to do with shells.  In particular, the
first obvious question is, does -I have the intended meaning with BSD
tar?  (Read the list of files from the specifed files.)

If you can't debug the tar invocation on your system (OpenBSD), maybe
someone else can.

Also, you didn't mention how long you waited.  Perhaps it was simply
copying a lot of files.

karl