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exec form vs shell form

Command forms

RUN, ENTRYPOINT, and CMD are all directives to run a command in your Dockerfile. All three takes two forms of command, shell form and exec form.

1. Shell form
The commands are written without the [] brackets and are run by the container's shell as a child process, the normal way of running things in Linux and by default the shell is /bin/sh -c

FROM alphine:latest

# /bin/sh -c 'echo $HOME'
RUN echo $HOME

# /bin/sh -c 'echo $PATH
CMD echo $PATH

2. Exec form
The commands are written in [] brackets and are run directly, not through a shell, mean which means is the main process with PID 1. You will not get shell features like variable substitution from environment variable. In addition, you will not be able to pipe output, chain commands, IO redirections. Those features are only possible with shell form.

FROM alpine:latest

RUN ["pwd"]

CMD ["sleep", "1s"]

Differences between shell and exec form

In shell form, commands will inherit the environment variables from the shell

FROM alphine:latest

# This will echo out /root because it is run in the shell
RUN echo $HOME

# This will just echo "$HOME" because it isn't using variable substitution, a shell feature.
RUN ["echo", "$HOME"]

In addition, because the shell form runs the command via shell, i.e. it will spawn child process to run the commands if you are going to stop the container it will require 2 signals to stop it. In exec form because your process is the main process i.e. with PID of 1, when you stop the container docker only needs to send one signal to stop the main process.

The container stops when the main process PID of 1 stops.

  • RUN: Use shell form
  • ENTRYPOINT: Use exec form
  • CMD: Use exec for
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