On Wed, Jun 17, 2020 at 11:17:08PM +0100, Piscium via arch-general wrote:
But switching to dash would also be about security, as less code means less bugs [5].
Usage of a more concise, powerful and clean shell language is much more suitable as a point when bringing forth an argument of there being less bugs. I'd say that the amount of bugs in the underlying implementation of a shell almost does matter nothing when compared to the horrors of hacked-together shell scripts that try to be as "basic" as possible, trying to be as "compatible" as possible with anything, exchanging cleanliness and expressiveness for horrible Debian init script-style code. Saving a pseudo-array into a string just to manually reconstruct the pseudo-list when the occasion arises to access a specific element is just one example of what awaits people who ignore the benefits of Bash arrays when they could have had them just by using a different shebang. And nearly everybody who has to write this quickly will do it wrong.