I agree it's definitely on purpose. As you write, there is no reason to keep the full script in memory. Sure, human-written scripts will always fit, and probabl

I agree it's definitely on purpose. As you write, there is no reason to keep the full script in memory. Sure, human-written scripts will always fit, and probably did so even in the old days, but some scripts are computer-generated. (Recall those "self-extracting shell scripts"? Their size is unbounded. Nowadays they even have a hip .io domain: makeself.io) Secondly, bash does not always seek back and reread parts of the script it already read. For instance it will skip doing that when only executing plain echo commands instead of commands which necessitate forking. Perhaps someone could look up the relevant part of the source? See it for yourself by stracing (with strace -e %process,%file,read,write,lseek) a file containing echo a echo b echo c versus date +a date +b date +c