The curious thing here is that with regard to the problematic behavior of the echo command, that "dash" cannot claim to be taking the moral high ground here, since dash's builtin echo is also not Unix-2003-compliant.
According to http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/echo.html "Implementations shall not support any options." but dash's echo supports the (historic BSD) -n option. There are no Unix 2003 compliant echo commands in common use! As that same page says, "The two different historical versions of echo vary in fatally incompatible ways." Note also how surprising it is to users that the standard shell's builtin echo is not compatible with the standard /bin/echo. The whole point of having the shell providing a builtin command is to provide a *completely* compatible, but higher performing, replacement for the standard standalone command. Since dash's echo is incompatible with GNU echo, dash is not suitable for use as a standard system shell. (Perhaps dash originated on a system where its builtin echo was compatible with that system's /bin/echo?) If Ubuntu persists in its present course of using dash as /bin/sh, there will be no way to have future reliable Ubuntu LTS versions, since dashisms will creep in. Users will merely have the choice of different sets of bugs, depending on whether they choose /bin/sh to point to /bin/bash or /bin/dash. -- Script that are using bash could be broken with the new symlink https://launchpad.net/bugs/61463 -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
