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    "In the end, Debian had to make slight adjustments to the Almquist shell, to add support for a couple of non-POSIX shell constructs that were simply too deeply and widely embedded and too useful to get rid of." — Which of your many links has info about this? That sounds very interesting. :) Commented Dec 23, 2015 at 2:57
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    IMHO, performance is only a motivator to get people to agree with the changes. The initial big reason for changing was that bash kept breaking backwards compatibility. I've personally had to fix bash problems at least 3 times in my career because the script would work in one version of bash but failed in another (usually happens after OS upgrade). Dash is not merely a slightly faster interpreter. It is also much more stable in terms of behaviour. Commented Dec 23, 2015 at 9:12
  • I would be interested whether the comments in the Schily Bourne Shell man page, see schilytools.sourceforge.net/bosh.html are suitable to permit people to understand how to write a portable script (that only depends on Bourne Shell features from 1989). What I did was mentioning every enhancement that was not in old Bourne Shells. BTW: I am also interested to know a list of bashisms in dash. Commented Dec 23, 2015 at 9:59