Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 63429
Need tiny /bin/sh to optimize system performance
Last modified: 2008-05-01 11:38:02 EDT
Summary of the problem can been seen below: sh-2.05a# ls -l /bin/sh lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 Apr 13 20:48 /bin/sh -> /bin/bash sh-2.05a# ls -l /bin/bash -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 541096 Mar 25 19:20 /bin/bash It's just crazy to use a binary sized over a half megabytes as /bin/sh. When a system has to run shell scripts constantly, system performance could be improved by using other shell than the bloated bash2. /bin/ash would be a good candidate: sh-2.05a# ls -l /bin/ash -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 108326 Feb 21 19:03 /bin/ash The problem is that /etc/init.d/functions and some other RH provided scripts are not compatible with /bin/ash (or vice versa, but the point is that /bin/ash won't understand current scripts). Are there any plans to use some other shell as /bin/sh than bash2 in the future?
No, for the following reasons: - no smaller shell provides all the things we need during the startup process (Functions? Internationalization?). - bash is the standard shell on Linux; therefore, every 3rd party application expects to see bash as /bin/sh. Even switching to a similarily powerful shell like zsh would cause problems with those scripts