dash

dash (Debian Almquist shell) is a port of ash to Debian.

Line editing

Despite the man page describing line editing as a feature and including options -V and -E for vi and emacs command line editors, dash as made available in the Debian repository is not actually compiled with support for line editing as of Trixie.

A workaround for this issue is using packages rlwrap, ledit or rlfe, both of which provide wrappers capable of giving line editing capabilities to several CLI utilities, dash included.

In my testing, rlfe made everything bold, whereas rlwrap kept formatting unchanged. rlwrap is actively maintained as of 2026, while ledit's last version is from'2018. rlfe is part of readline itself, which is also actively maintained.

History

In dash(1), the History section states:

dash is a POSIX-compliant implementation of /bin/sh that aims to be as small as possible. dash is a direct descendant of the NetBSD version of ash (the Almquist SHell), ported to Linux in early 1997. It was renamed to dash in 2002.