What is the difference between bash and sh?

Question

I see two types of code being used:

#!/usr/bin/sh

and:

#!/user/bin/bash

I searched for this online and opinions vary a lot. The explanations I saw on most websites say that sh is older than bash, and that there is no real difference.

Does someone know the difference between these? Can you give me a practical example when to use one over the other?

Answer 1

bash is a superset of sh ie. everything you can do in sh you can do in bash.

Bash has more features (branching, builtins, arrays) making script easier to write. Some later *nix'es have /bin/sh as a link to /bin/bash

For a full explanation of what here's a tutorial

Answer 2

Traditionally, /bin/sh would have been the original Bourne shell, which has no history or command-line editing, and no job control.

For about the last 15 years or so, most Unixes have had the POSIX shell installed, or at least ksh or bash (which are very nearly POSIX-like), but still have the more limited shell in /bin/sh

The reason for that is so that older shell scripts which expect the older sh command will still work.
Since characters like {, } and ! have special meaning to bash, it's possible that an older shell script using those characters (without escaping them) could fail.
(The Bourne shell would take !!{1,2} literally, whereas bash would interpret that as a repeat of the previous command (!!) followed by a brace-expansion).

On Linux though, the sh command is almost always just a link to bash, with all the same features.

Answer 3

sh can either mean Bourne shell or /bin/sh, which is some other (POSIX-conformant) shell on most modern platforms. "The POSIX shell" is the abstract shell defined by POSIX, which is implemented by bash in POSIX mode, or ksh or dash by default. /bin/sh is sometimes also called the POSIX shell, because it's a shell that conforms to POSIX on most platforms. The original Bourne shells aren't POSIX shells.

bashref has a list of differences between bash and Bourne shells. man bash has a list of changes when bash is invoked in POSIX mode.

/bin/sh is not a symlink or hard link on OS X, but it's almost the same size as /bin/bash:

$ ls -li /bin/{ba,}sh
29631757 -r-xr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  1333920 Jul 26 01:52 /bin/bash
29631758 -r-xr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  1334000 Jul 26 01:52 /bin/sh

man bash:

If bash is invoked with the name sh, it tries to mimic the startup behavior of historical versions of sh as closely as possible, while conforming to the POSIX standard as well.

The mimicking of Bourne shells is otherwise pretty limited. bash +B (Bourne) would actually disable features like brace expansion.

$ sh
$ echo {a,b}
a b
$ echo $BASH_VERSION
3.2.48(1)-release
$ bash +B
$ echo {a,b}
{a,b}

But even if you disable POSIX mode, echo behaves like echo -e by default:

$ sh
$ shopt -uo posix
$ echo '1\b2'
2

/bin/sh is dash on Ubuntu, so some bashisms work with /bin/sh on OS X but not Ubuntu.

If you actually want to write scripts for (something like) the original Bourne shells, you could use #!/usr/bin/env bash +B instead.

I think it's easier to write scripts for bash than to avoid features that aren't part of the POSIX specifications or Bourne shells or test everything with other shells.

Answer 4

Actually, even though /bin/sh may be a link to /bin/bash, if started up as sh it behaves differently. From the bash manpage:

If bash is invoked with the name sh, it tries to mimic the startup behavior of historical versions of sh as closely as possible, while conforming to the POSIX standard as well.

So as sh, it tries to emulate historical sh behavior. As bash, it tries to be as useful as possible as an interactive login shell.

Answer 5

On many systems and on Solaris in particular, bash is dynamically linked while sh is statically linked. This may pose a security threat, for this reason root user should only use /bin/sh as shell (if you ever need to log as root).