Recommendations for a light POSIX complaint shell as an alternative for BASH

General system Newbie
1

There are some distros who have switched from BASH to other POSIX compliant shells for running scripts, i.e. those scripts which use #!/bin/sh. These shells are lighter, i.e. consume less RAM and CPU resources, while being POSIX compliant.

Debian and Void Linux use DASH, Alpine Linux has ash.

Apart from zsh/ksh/csh/tsch what would be a good alternative to BASH for EOS? i.e. a light weight shell which is POSIX compliant?

2

No sure if you wanna change the default shell or just the shell in your terminal. EOS is an Arch based distro. That means bash is the default shell in the system, which is used in all system scripts. It’s possible to change it to a slightly lighter and faster alternatives, such as dash or mksh, but it’s not recommended.

If you just use another shell instead of the default bash in your terminal. It’s easy. You could try dash/mksh for their smaller memory footprint and speed. For ease of use, bash, zsh and fish are still your best options.

3

Yeah I am looking whether I can change the login shell as well the shell that is used to execute the shell scripts which have #!/bin/sh

Currently in Arch /bin/sh is a symbolic link to BASH shell.

For Terminal I plan to use bash.

4

from wiki : https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Command-line_shell
there is a script shellcheck for posix and bash validation

5

I dare to say that the resources you consume less when using a lighter shell than bash is peanuts nowadays.

4 Likes
6

I tried to change to use dash as the default shell in Arch. It’s not trivial and the improvement is very limited. Moreover, future update/upgrade may break your system. I’d say it’s not worth doing it. Stay with what Arch offers.

7

It was not a smooth transition for Ubuntu/Debian (and might not be for Arch too) :

A result of the shift is that many shell scripts were found making use of Bash-specific functionalities (“bashisms”) without properly declaring it in the shebang line.[10][11] The problem was first spotted in Ubuntu and the Ubuntu maintainers decided to make all the scripts comply with the POSIX standard. The changes were later upstreamed to Debian, which eventually adopted Dash as its default /bin/sh too.

8

Are you running a system with lass than 1GB of ram? I doubt you would notice a bit of difference between default shells. For the effort and time tracking down possible idiosyncrasies, in the hopes of gaining nanoseconds, why would you want to bother?