[oclug] .bash_profile scripting

[Adrian Irving-Beer]

On Thu, Nov 18, 2004 at 09:02:58PM +0000, Matthew Wilcox wrote:

> That's not *quite* fair.  bash is ported to approximately 1
> bajillion different operating systems, including Windows.  But I
> agree that very few of these other operating systems come with bash
> installed by default.

"Portability" can mean more than that.  For example, I switched
to using 'dash' (formerly 'ash', I believe) as my /bin/sh,
because according to Debian spec, any POSIX-compliant shell can
be used as /bin/sh.

I've seen a significant performance boost across the system. Informal
benchmarking tells me that dash can be launched 8x faster than bash
(17x user, 4x system) and run internal commands (e.g. 'echo') over
50x as fast.

Fortunately, because this is Debian policy (and may in fact *only* be
Debian policy, I don't know), it doesn't cause a problem for any part
of the system.  Unfortunately, when I did the switch, I began the
daily discovering of scripts of mine that needed to be de-bashified, or
converted to use #!/bin/bash.

Don't let this happen to you! ;)
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