Bourne shell

The Bourne shell (codice_1) is a shell command-line interpreter for computer operating systems.
The Bourne shell was the default shell for Version 7 Unix. Unix-like systems continue to have codice_2—which will be the Bourne shell, or a symbolic link or hard link to a compatible shell—even when other shells are used by most users.
Developed by Stephen Bourne at Bell Labs, it was a replacement for the Thompson shell, whose executable file had the same name—codice_1. It was released in 1979 in the Version 7 Unix release distributed to colleges and universities. Although it is used as an interactive command interpreter, it was also intended as a scripting language and contains most of the features that are commonly considered to produce structured programs.
It gained popularity with the publication of "The Unix Programming Environment" by Brian Kernighan and Rob Pike—the first commercially published book that presented the shell as a programming language in a tutorial form.
History.
Origins.
Work on the Bourne shell initially started in 1976. First appearing in Version 7 Unix, the Bourne shell superseded the Mashey shell.
Some of the primary goals of the shell were:
Features of the original version.
Features of the Version 7 UNIX Bourne shell include:
The Bourne shell also was the first to feature the convention of using file descriptor codice_11 for error messages, allowing much greater programmatic control during scripting by keeping error messages separate from data.
Stephen Bourne's coding style was influenced by his experience with the ALGOL 68C compiler that he had been working on at Cambridge University. In addition to the style in which the program was written, Bourne reused portions of ALGOL 68's codice_12, codice_9 and codice_14" (using codice_15 instead of codice_16) clauses in the common Unix Bourne shell syntax. Moreover, – although the v7 shell is written in C – Bourne took advantage of some macros to give the C source code an ALGOL 68 flavor. These macros (along with the finger command distributed in Unix version 4.2BSD) inspired the International Obfuscated C Code Contest (IOCCC).
Features introduced after 1979.
Over the years, the Bourne shell was enhanced at AT&T. The various variants are thus called like the respective AT&T Unix version it was released with (some important variants being Version7, SystemIII, SVR2, SVR3, SVR4). As the shell was never versioned, the only way to identify it was testing its features.
Features of the Bourne shell versions since 1979 include:
Variants.
DMERT shell.
Duplex Multi-Environment Real-Time (DMERT) is a hybrid time-sharing/real-time operating system developed in the 1970s at Bell Labs Indian Hill location in Naperville, Illinois uses a 1978 snapshot of Bourne Shell "VERSION sys137 DATE 1978 Oct 12 22:39:57". The DMERT shell runs on 3B21D computers still in use in the telecommunications industry.
Korn shell.
The Korn shell (ksh) written by David Korn based on the original Bourne Shell source code, was a middle road between the Bourne shell and the C shell. Its syntax was chiefly drawn from the Bourne shell, while its job control features resembled those of the C shell. The functionality of the original Korn Shell (known as ksh88 from the year of its introduction) was used as a basis for the POSIX shell standard. A newer version, ksh93, has been open source since 2000 and is used on some Linux distributions. A clone of ksh88 known as pdksh is the default shell in OpenBSD.
Schily Bourne Shell.
Jörg Schilling's Schily-Tools includes three Bourne Shell derivatives.
Relationship to other shells.
C shell.
Bill Joy, the author of the C shell, criticized the Bourne shell as being unfriendly for interactive use, a task for which Stephen Bourne himself acknowledged C shell's superiority. Bourne stated, however, that his shell was superior for scripting and was available on any Unix system, and Tom Christiansen also criticized C shell as being unsuitable for scripting and programming.
Almquist shells.
Due to copyright issues surrounding the Bourne Shell as it was used in historic CSRG BSD releases, Kenneth Almquist developed a clone of the Bourne Shell, known by some as the Almquist shell and available under the BSD license, which is in use today on some BSD descendants and in low-memory situations. The Almquist Shell was ported to Linux, and the port renamed the Debian Almquist shell, or dash. This shell provides faster execution of standard codice_1 (and POSIX-standard codice_1, in modern descendants) scripts with a smaller memory footprint than its counterpart, Bash. Its use tends to expose bashisms – bash-centric assumptions made in scripts meant to run on sh.
Usage.
The Bourne shell was once standard on all branded Unix systems, although historically BSD-based systems had many scripts written in csh. As the basis of POSIX codice_1 syntax, Bourne shell scripts can typically be run with Bash or dash on Linux or other Unix-like systems.