History of UNIX Shells

The independence of the shell from the UNIX operating system per se has led to the development of dozens of shells throughout UNIX history—although only a few have achieved widespread use.

The first major shell was the Bourne shell (named after its inventor, Steven Bourne); it was included in the first popular version of UNIX, Version 7, starting in 1979. The Bourne shell is known on the system as sh. Although UNIX has gone through many, many changes, the Bourne shell is still popular and essentially unchanged. Several UNIX utilities and administration features depend on it.

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The first widely used alternative shell was the C shell, or csh. This was written by Bill Joy at the University of California at Berkeley as part of the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) version of UNIX that came out a couple of years after Version 7.

The C shell gets its name from the resemblance of its commands to statements in the C Programming Language, which makes the shell easier for programmers on UNIX systems to learn. It supports a number of operating system features (e.g., job control; see Chapter 8) that were unique to BSD UNIX but by now have migrated to most other modern versions. It also has a few important features (e.g., aliases; see Chapter 3) that make it easier to use in general.

In recent years a number of other shells have become popular. The most notable of these is the Korn shell. This shell is a commercial product that incorporates the best features of the Bourne and C shells, plus many features of its own.[1] The Korn shell is similar to bash in most respects; both have an abundance of features that make them easy to work with. The advantage of bash is that it is free. For further information on the Korn shell see Appendix A.