this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2022
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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I guess a mixture of POSIX compatibility, backward compatibility and non-interactive shell use-cases.
Being somewhat POSIX compatible offers a way to write scripts that work on many systems independent of the actual shell implementation (bash, dash, zsh...). But this means major overhauls of the shell "language" are out of question...
Backward compatibility gets important for things that ignored the first point and used features only available in bash. Given that bash is the default for 30 years for linux now there are probably plenty of examples.
And while bash is not the smallest shell it is also not the largest one...and rather configurable at compile-time when it comes to supported features. This makes it a viable option as "shell-script" interpreter for systems that hardly have any interactive shell usage. It's not a completely bare-bone shell so you get a bit of "comfort" for scripts but you can remove unnecessary things like interactive command line editing with lib readline..I can imagine some embedded systems find uses for such a shell.
And it's not that there aren't alternatives...Microsoft's Powershell is probably the most successful one "recently". But changing all existing "workflows" from a text-based one to an object based one is not a trivial task...and in addition you run in new problems with any new shell design (For example I really dislike the overly verbose interactive use age of powershell but that's rather subjective)