[jjmarr]

The original discussion on why Debian switched from bash to dash for /bin/sh is insightful.

https://lwn.net/Articles/343924/

One big factor is for performance reasons in shell scripts. At the time, the switch decreased boot times for Debian by 7.5%. Bourne shell features add a lot of overhead and that's not always an acceptable tradeoff.

Also, if you're using bash features in a script, you can always just add #!/bin/bash to the top of your file instead of #!/bin/sh to force a bash compatible shell.

[cesarb]

> One big factor is for performance reasons in shell scripts. At the time, the switch decreased boot times for Debian by 7.5%.

And that should no longer be a relevant factor, since most of the boot process is now implemented directly in C (within systemd), instead of a bunch of shell scripts.

[cayley_graph]

Prefer `#!/usr/bin/env bash` instead, since /bin/bash isn't a standardized location for bash (even across Linux distros). The former causes $PATH to be searched for bash.

[mappu]

This is pretty common advice but I think it is fighting the previous war. This idea is useful for virtualenv-type tricks if you want to ensure use of your personal version of the interpreter on a shared system, but you have to boil an ocean of scripts. You don't know if you caught them all. Docker won instead - a quick filesystem namespace comprehensively catches everything. Just use #!/bin/bash.

EDIT: I was thinking about Linux, but I suppose macOS users are stuck with needing this for Homebrew-supplied bash?

[cayley_graph]

#!/bin/bash won't work on, say, nixos, and as you noted, many non-linux platforms. It's a few more characters to do something (more) portable! You're right that docker (or something like nix flakes, which are lighter-weight/easier to introspect imo) are probably a better solution in the long run, though.

[n_plus_1_acc]

Is /usr/bin/env a standardized location?

[cayley_graph]

I don't know, but it's been more reliable for me than /bin/bash. I think env is part of POSIX.

[ko1nksm]

No. No new locations added in POSIX.1-2024.

https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/basedefs/V1...

POSIX omits from standardisation what is not necessary for an application to work, so that a wide range of systems can be supported. As for Shebang, it can be rewritten in the installation script and is therefore considered an area of system administration.

[arp242]

> One big factor is for performance reasons in shell scripts. At the time, the switch decreased boot times for Debian by 7.5%. Bourne shell features add a lot of overhead and that's not always an acceptable tradeoff.

I seem to recall it was much smaller than that, something like 4% on a 2008 EEE-PC or something like that, but I can't find any numbers on that right now.

The Debian startup scripts were already POSIX; it's not hard to get better performance out of zsh or bash by avoiding expensive processes lookups.

Overall, I consider this to be mostly a myth, or at least extremely simplistic.