When comparing DASH vs csh, the Slant community recommends DASH for most people. In the question“What are the best Bash replacements?” DASH is ranked 4th while csh is ranked 15th. The most important reason people chose DASH is:
Dash has a very fast startup, this happens because the shell is started a lot of times during boot and dash minimizes the work it does during this process.
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Fast startup
Dash has a very fast startup, this happens because the shell is started a lot of times during boot and dash minimizes the work it does during this process.
Pro Low memory usage, which matters a lot in embedded
It is designed to be very lightweight and has no support for shell specific extensions that are not POSIX.
Pro Default shell on Debian systems
DASH is the default shell for Debian based systems due to it speed, full POSIX compliance and low overhead.
Pro Full POSIX support
It's fully POSIX compatible, so if your script runs on dash it will probably run on all other shells.
Pro A perfect clone
It's a clone of the original System V4 Bourne shell.
Pro Most influential Unix shell alongside sh
C shell introduced functionality such as history and editing mechanisms, aliases, directory stacks, tilde notation, cdpath, job control and path hashing.
Cons
Con Doesn't support all bash features
Dash does not support all bash features, sometimes called 'bashisms' unless explicitly pointed at /bin/sh
.