Locations

Typical locations of shells are covered below. This is useful in the terminal and in scripts (where the target shell is set in the first line). For terminal use where you do not need to be specific, the name will be fine e.g. bash rather than /bin/bash.

  • Bash - /bin/bash
  • ZSH - /bin/zsh
  • Dash - /bin/dash

The SH shell

Historically for the Bourne Shell, before Bash, the sh form is faster and lacks some features. It is usually aliased to dash on Debian or to Bash on other systems.

Read more here.

/bin/sh

List your installed shells

Here with output from macOS.

$ ls -1 /bin/*sh
bash
csh
dash
ksh
sh
tcsh
zsh