default shell in Ubuntu

[Rashkae]

vsrk sarma wrote:
> First of all, pardon me for raising fundamental query.
> I like now about default shell available in terminal mode.
> It seems it is dash and NOT bash, as /usr/bin/sh links to /usr/bin/dash.
> Is my premise correct?

Not quite.

The default shell for users should be /bin/bash (you can verify by
examining /etc/passwd file)

dash is meant to be non-interactive, and having so many features for an
interactive shell removed, is much faster than bash at executing shell
scripts.  (most of which start  with #!/bin/sh)

When the change was first introduced several versions of Ubuntu ago,
there were some conflicts with shell scripts that wrongly assumed
/bin/sh was bash and used non-posix complient syntax (sometimes called
bashisms.)  Those should all be weeded out by now, and any shell script
you run across should either be Posix complient, or refers to bash by name.