Bourne shell
Bourne shell interaction on Version 7 Unix
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| Original author(s) | Stephen Bourne |
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| Initial release | 1977 |
| Operating system | Unix |
| Type | Unix shell |
| License | [under ] |
The Bourne shell (sh) is a shell, or command-line interpreter, for computer operating systems.
The Bourne shell was the default shell for Unix Version 7. Most Unix-like systems continue to have /bin/sh—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—sh. It was released in 1977 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.
Coding started in 1976
First appearing in Version 7 Unix, the Bourne shell superseded the Mashey shell.
Among the primary goals were:
Features of the UNIX Version 7 Bourne shell include:
The Bourne shell also was the first to feature the convention of using file descriptor 2> for error messages, allowing much greater programmatic control during scripting by keeping error messages separate from data.
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