On my rhel7 system, the Debian dash shell is this large: $ ll /bin/dash -rwxr-xr-x. 1 root root 113536 Nov 5 2018 /bin/dash I happen to have an old pow

On my rhel7 system, the Debian dash shell is this large: $ ll /bin/dash -rwxr-xr-x. 1 root root 113536 Nov 5 2018 /bin/dash I happen to have an old powershell installed: $ rpm -qi powershell | grep Size Size : 126588370 A strict POSIX shell is always going to be vastly smaller, for many reasons. I would prefer that the POSIX shell was an LR-parsed language, but you can't have everything.