Almquist shell
| Developer(s) | Kenneth Almquist |
|---|---|
| Initial release | May 30, 1989 |
| Development status | Active |
| Written in | C |
| Operating system | Various Unix-like operating systems (BSD, MINIX, Linux, Android) |
| Available in | English, multilingual (gettext) |
| Type | Unix shell |
| Developer(s) | Herbert Xu |
|---|---|
| Initial release | July 15, 1997 |
| Development status | Active |
| Written in | C |
| Operating system | Linux, Android |
| Available in | English, multilingual (gettext) |
| Type | Unix shell |
| Website | http://gondor.apana.org.au/~herbert/dash/ |
The Almquist shell (also known as A Shell, ash and sh) is a lightweight Unix shell originally written by Kenneth Almquist in the late 1980s. Initially a clone of the System V.4 variant of the Bourne shell, it replaced the original Bourne shell in the BSD versions of Unix released in the early 1990s.
ash was first released via a posting to the comp.sources.unix Usenet news group, approved and moderated by Rich Salz on 30 May 1989. It was described as "a reimplementation of the System V shell [with] most features of that shell, plus some additions".
The following is extracted from the ash package information from Slackware:
ash (Kenneth Almquist's ash shell)
A lightweight (92K) Bourne compatible shell. Great for machines with low memory, but does not provide all the extras of shells like bash, tcsh, and zsh. Runs most shell scripts compatible with the Bourne shell. Note that under Linux, most scripts seem to use at least some bash-specific syntax. The Slackware setup scripts are a notable exception, since ash is the shell used on the install disks. NetBSD and Ubuntu uses ash as its /bin/sh.
Fast, small, and virtually compatible with the POSIX standard's specification of the Unix shell, ash did not feature line editing or command history mechanisms, because Almquist felt that such functionality should be moved into the terminal driver. However, current variants support it.
Derivative versions of ash are installed as the default shell (/bin/sh) on FreeBSD, NetBSD, DragonFly BSD, MINIX, and Android, and in some Linux distributions.
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