dash

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dash is the Debian Almquist shell: a small, fast, and POSIX compliant shell. It is well-suited for startup scripts, and is used on Debian (and derivative distributions) as /bin/sh.

As some shell scripts may have "bashisms" in them, dash is not guaranteed to work as a /bin/sh replacement on Gentoo, out-of-the-box.

See the terminal emulator article for some general usage pointers, though dash is not often used in interactive mode.

Installation

USE flags

USE flags for app-shells/dash Debian Almquist Shell

libedit	Use the libedit library (replacement for readline)
static	!!do not set this during bootstrap!! Causes binaries to be statically linked instead of dynamically

Data provided by the Gentoo Package Database · Last update: 2023-01-28 20:21 More information about USE flags

Emerge

root #emerge --ask app-shells/dash

Configuration

Make dash the default system shell:

root #cd /bin

root #ln -sf dash sh

root #echo /bin/dash >>/etc/shells

root #usermod -s /bin/dash root

Use dash as current shell:

user $chsh -s /bin/dash

Alternatively, just use app-eselect/eselect-sh:

root #eselect sh set /bin/dash

Troubleshooting

Garbled display

The output of a shell can, in some conditions, become corrupt. See the terminal emulator article for instructions to help fix this.

See also

• Shell — command-line interpreter that offers a text-based interface to users.