Comment 34 for bug 61463

What about modifying dash to allow a full implementation of echo? If this really is the only bash-ism that is breaking things, then dash could work around it, that way Ubuntu can use dash as the default shell and be fast, whilst still having everything work correctly. Maybe this means it doesn't comply with the POSIX standard, but it would mean that the huge amounts of legacy code wouldn't break.

If what Jeff Schering says is true, then it suggests that the problem is *not* with the devs of bash, or the myriad of software that depends on it as /bin/sh, but is down to the POSIX standard being changed. All these scripts would have been POSIX-compliant until 2004 when the spec was changed. Maybe this should be filed as a bug in the new POSIX standard...

Just my two cents. :-)