Gilbert Ashley The package sysvinit-scripts-dash contains modified versions of the main init scripts rc.4, rc.6, rc.K, rc.M and rc.S, plus a few extras which are called by the main scripts and which may be a potential 'bottleneck' during the init process - mainly rc.udev, rc.inet1, rc.inet2, rc.wireless. It also includes a dash version of the rescan-scsi-bus script and rc.scanluns. These scripts are all modified to use the dash shell instead of /bin/sh (linked to bash). Using these scripts with dash speeds up the boot process considerably. These scripts should be installed *after* installing the dash shell and make sure dash is installed as /bin/dash. To ensure the maximum flexibility on your system, these scripts are written to be run using the shell /bin/initsh. Installing this package will create the link from /bin/initsh to /bin/dash if dash is already installed. If /bin/dash is not present, then a link will be created to /bin/sh when the package is installed: ( ln -sf /bin/sh /bin/dash ). These scripts might work with the 'ash' shell, as well, but this is untested. If you want to try anyway, be sure to create a link from /bin/initsh to /bin/ash: ln -sf /bin/ash /bin/initsh These scripts are based on the original init scripts from Slackware and include some modifications by Tim Goya and Sasha Alexandr. Installing this package replaces the original versions of the scripts listed above, but the originals are saved and renamed -adding the '.bash' suffix to the name. debian, ubuntu and Mandriva Linux all use /bin/dash as the main /bin/sh shell, but this leads to lots of problems when running externally-maintained shell scripts which start with the '#!/bin/sh' shebang, but which actually contains 'bashisms' -that is, code that only works when /bin/sh is a link to /bin/bash. Using the fictitious shell /bin/initsh allows us to install and use the scripts in this package while still maintaining whatever /bin/sh the user wants or already has. Internally, when these scripts call other initscripts which are not part of this package, it calls them in such a way as to not depend on them being dash-compatible -that is, they call them using /bin/sh.