Low End Box

A while a go I looked at Bash replacements for interactive shells. Unfortunately for me, I am just getting too used to having Bash on the command line and can’t get myself used to other shells.

However, interactive shell is one thing, and scripting shell is another. If your scripts are compatible with the original bourne shell, then you should try dash instead of that big fat Bash! This morning I just discovered one of my Debian 5 VPS is not having /bin/sh linked to dash by default, so I “fixed” the problem, and here is the memory consumption result:

Before

$ ps aux | grep /bin/sh
root      7473  0.0  0.1   2416  1156 ?        S    Feb12   0:00 /bin/sh /usr/bin/mysqld_safe

After

$ ps aux | grep /bin/sh
root     15528  0.0  0.0   1632   520 ?        S    10:03   0:00 /bin/sh /usr/bin/mysqld_safe

Yup. 1/2 MB reclaimed. Just make sure your /bin/sh is linked to dash. If it’s not already the case, then for Debian/Ubuntu based systems

# apt-get install dash
# dpkg-reconfigure dash

You also need to make sure all your scripts are compatible with sh/dash (which they ought to anyway).