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Hi, I can see the same errors on that page as on the one about "Unix shell".
The Bourne shell is generally no longer located as /bin/sh. It is only the case on some very rare systems (like Solaris cited above). Many systems don't have a Bourne shell at all anymore, and when they have one, it's generally either in a non standard place such as /usr/old/bin or has a different name such as bsh or sh.bourne. The sh code wasn't made free until very recently. That's why no Free Unix system ever had it (exception of early BSDs which was the cause of law suites, BSDs then adopted the Almquist shell which was a free reimplementation of the Bourne shell as it could be found on SysV with some extensions and has now been made POSIX (modern sh) conformant).
Many scripts are still written in a Bourne compatible syntax, but just because it is the greatest common denominator of the shs of the past and current Unices. sh is often confused with the Bourne shell because sh has been the Bourne shell on many systems for a long period of time.
So it's no longer a popular default shell either, nor is it the default login shell for root on many operating systems. sh is though.
And it's wrong to say it's standard on all commercial Unices.
See my comments on the Unix shell page for details.
Another error:
"for loops, in particular the use of $* to loop over arguments". That's incorrect. $* is the concatenation of the positional parameters. It's $@ when double quoted that allows to loop over the positional parameters, not $*. And "for" loops over the positional parameters by default, so there's no need to specify "$@":
for i do whatever "$i" done
(it's not for do od, but for do done in the Bourne shell)
I don't know if one can say that the Korn shell was written "much later" than csh. I believe it was started in the early eighties (read 1982 somewhere) so only 3 years after csh (I might be wrong on that one).
while ~ do ~ od
/bin/od
would have predated the Bourne shell syntax, and while ~ do ~ done
is correct. I can fix this right away. Are there any historical citations on why done
as used? The Bourne's original mac.h
file uses both, eg.FOR ~ DO ~ OD # for loop # WHILE cond DO ~ OD # early termination loop # REP ~ PER cond DONE # late termination loop # LOOP ~ POOL # infinite loop #
$*
vs "$@"
$@
originally, or it was added as an enhancement. I see a lot of $* in code even today that should be "$@". Was "$@" apart of the original design, or an enhancement? Need to check the original source tree somehow... I wonder if is still compiles... :-) (BTW IIRC csh used $*:q for "$@") --
NevilleDNZ
12:48, 10 September 2006 (UTC)I removed the paragraph under Descendants which talks about the C shell, because it's not a descendant of the Bourne shell (it ran The C shell (csh), derived not from the Bourne shell but the Thompson shell,&hellip). I incorporated the relevant (and only the relevant) context into the Korn shell's description; also improving the style somewhat. I hope it works for you. -- Rfsmit ( talk) 21:14, 21 July 2008 (UTC)
Should this page be retitled: Bourne shell; a history or Bourne shell; background?? and a link added to a page that actually talks about what the Bourne shell is/does? DGerman ( talk) 14:29, 29 January 2009 (UTC)
Bourne called them "shell procedures" not "shell scripts". Should this article follow his terminology? Geo Swan ( talk) 04:29, 1 February 2009 (UTC)
This article about sh starts with a screenshot of another shell, bash. Although the article claims that bash is a clone of sh (I do not agree), would it not be more enlightening to have instead a screenshot of the same program as is discussed in the article? For instance, the standard prompt in sh is "$", while in bash it is "user-name@host-name:/the/current/dir$". Also, colorisation by default is very uncommon for sh in my experience. To me, this is much like having a picture of a SAAB car in an Opel article, although you could claim that modern SAABs are simply Opel-clones (since many parts are compatible). 83.209.89.69 ( talk) 20:08, 27 June 2010 (UTC)
The list of features currently includes "Scripts can be invoked as commands by using their filename". Was this a feature of the Bourne shell, or of the Unix kernel? In modern Unices it's certainly a kernel feature. Qwertyus ( talk) 22:04, 2 February 2011 (UTC)
Solaris distributes a version of the Bourne shell using CDDL. However, the license as cited in this topic probably should reflect that of whoever is the owner of the legacy AT&T code. That's probably not Oracle/Sun. TEDickey ( talk) 10:49, 28 March 2011 (UTC)
well freeBsd has version the bourne shell under bsd lisence -- 82.44.40.210 ( talk) 14:37, 28 May 2011 (UTC)
/*
22 * UNIX shell 23 * 24 * S. R. Bourne 25 * Rewritten By David Korn 26 * AT&T Labs 27 * 28 */
I've given a reliable Source. Any person with some minimal basic knowlege in UNIX history or with minimal programmings skills will be able to understand that in contrary to you, I pointed to the Bourne Shell source. But even if both skills are missing, people who run a halfway POSIX compliant OS could compile the sources and check the behavior. And everybody who is able to compile, could run the Bourne Shell and compatible test script from http://www.in-ulm.de/~mascheck/various/whatshell/whatshell.sh to discover what shell he is using.
The Korn Shell is an halfway incompatible fork on the Bourne Shell source that started in 1982. I know of no serious person that would call the Korn Shell "a minor variant" of the Bourne Shell. Besides the Korn history editor, the main difference between Bourne Shell and Korn Shell is pipeline execution order. Korn Shell prints "test" with:
echo test | read var echo $var
while Bourne Shell prints an empty line. Sources published by AT&T after aprox. 1984 do not include the "S. R. Bourne" tag in either Bourne or Korn Shell. Korn Shell sources that directly come from David Korn still have that tag but nobody would see this as an indication for seeing the Bourne Shell itself.
Regarding Licensing: Modern (function supporting) versions of the Bourne Shell have been closed source until Sun published a recent Bourne Shell under CDDL in June 2005. No other OSS license applies to such a Burne Shell variant. AT&T gave the OK for putting ksh93 under CPL in 2001. Before, the Korn Shell (but not the Bourne Shell) was availabe under a non-OSI compliant license for a few years (IIRC since 1997).
The advanced and portable version of the Bourne Shell that I publish since 2006 has been derived from the only legal OSS source at: http://src.opensolaris.org/source/xref/onnv/onnv-gate/usr/src/cmd/sh It adds the interactive shell history editor, I wrote in 1982-1984 for my private shell independently from David Korn.
The problem I see frequently with you is that you are missing the needed skills to be able to discuss a topic but still act as if you were the only person on the planet that knows things right. Together with your agressive discussion style, this creates a bad taste. I encourage you to behave more cooperative to avoid unneeded disputes. -- Schily ( talk) 15:06, 23 March 2012 (UTC)
Meaning no slight to Schily, I wish to point out that his historical account errs in suggesting that Caldera International's 2002 release of many releases of historical Unix through 1979's v7 and 32V doesn't include Bourne shell. It doubtless was ridiculously antique, poorly portable, and in K&R rather than ANSI C, but I'd be extremely surprised if it weren't the real Stephen Bourne codebase in all its 1970s (obsolete) glory -- and under Caldera's BSD-ish licensing terms. This history can be traced through the Heirloom Bourne Shell repository. ~~ unixguy — Preceding unsigned comment added by 198.144.195.190 ( talk) 08:48, 9 August 2016 (UTC)
If you like features from above, there is only one license that gives you access, the CDDL.
BTW: The history cannot be traced in the so called heirloom shell as this shell just started with the OpenSolaris sources with no history inside and stopped all activities after approx. 6 months, before becoming fully portable. Because it is full of bugs, you do not really like to use the heirloom shell. Schily ( talk) 11:50, 9 August 2016 (UTC)
I believe the matter under discussion is what the licence of the legacy AT&T Bourne shell code is/was. This Wikipedia article overwhelmingly concerns the historic shell as it existed in primordial Unix times up through, say, SysV release 4.x, which, with all due respect to noble attempts to update the code such as Schily and his CDDL posse, is IMO the last time (nearly) anyone actually cared about the Bourne shell except as the inspiration for ksh, bash, ash/dash, and the POSIX shell spec. Thus the article's use of the past tense through essentially all of the article's main text. Thus, I submit that the correct licence to cite for this article is what Schily calls the 'Caldera license', which close inspection reveals to be a verbatim application of the 4-clause BSD license. ~~unixguy — Preceding unsigned comment added by 198.144.195.190 ( talk) 09:05, 12 August 2016 (UTC)
Claiming that my logic means the bash article should 'mention only what has been available in 1989' is making a blatantly non-sequitur appeal, as (obviously) said article does not concern the historic initial state of Mr. Brian Fox's contribution to the GNU Project -- as witness the fact that its Wikipedia page, by contrast, is phrased in the present tense. Essentially, by ignoring the substance of what I said and raising irrelevancies such as the gratuitous assertion about ksh, you are conceding the point (but continuing to argue anyway). Ah well. So, volunteers of the Wikipedia Project: There is your answer, and I'd recommend you cease wasting time arguing with Schily and (enfin) change the Article text from 'Under discussion' to '4-clause BSD'. That should then free up energies for more fruitful matters. ~~unixguy — Preceding unsigned comment added by 198.144.195.190 ( talk) 17:21, 13 August 2016 (UTC)
The article mentions that "It was released in 1977 in the Version 7 Unix release", however the Version_7_Unix article states that Version 7 Unix was released in 1979. Not both are right, or there is a trick. DelTree ( talk) 12:50, 30 January 2012 (UTC)
It does not sem to be serious to have a "Criticism" section that looks as it if has been written in early 1981 and assumes for correctness that we still are in 1981.
Today in 2012, the test utility is a built-in command since 31years.
Functions (that can act as aliases) are in the Bourhe Shell since 28 years.
Job Control is in the the Bourne Shell since 23 years.
A History and a command line history editor (which is more than csh had in 1981) is in since 5.5 years.
In other words, most of the features have been in the Bourne Shell before bash exists. Also the csh syntax not really a C-derived syntax either. Csh did offer a few features that help in interacetive use while the Bourne Shell has been written to be usable for interactive use and for scripts. -- Schily ( talk) 13:02, 12 May 2012 (UTC)
The introduction says that the Bourne shell "was a replacement for the Thompson shell", and the Origins sections says that "The shell was designed as a replacement for the Mashey shell." So which is it? Teemu Leisti ( talk) 08:18, 4 January 2013 (UTC)
I came here to say the same thing, 8 years later -- andrewh — Preceding unsigned comment added by 167.179.152.63 ( talk) 05:06, 14 December 2020 (UTC)
Should good places to learn the Bourne shell be a separate article?
A class given at UC Berkeley by Michael Paoli has a concise reference to learning the shell. http://www.rawbw.com/~mp/unix/sh/ From experience teaching scripting he recommends starting with the six page 1979 sh man page! http://plan9.bell-labs.com/7thEdMan/v7vol1.pdf
Another good answer for where beginners might productively start seems to be the "Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide" http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/ which despite the title doesn't start at the Advanced level. Advanced is where you will end up after reading it. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Grantbow ( talk • contribs) 09:45, 31 March 2013 (UTC)
First of all, I was under the mistaken (understandable?) impression that the Bourne shell was the original. I knew however that some systems substitute dash for sh (compatible) I think for programs. And I knew that user shells are selectable. Now my question is, is there a minimum amount of shell functionality that has been supported (and still is supported) in the "first considered" Unix shell? I know about the previous Thompson and PWB shells (are they the only previous shells?). Are they not considered Unix (anymore)? lintsh (should it be mentioned in the page?) inticates they are not important (or the Android shell?).
My (challenged) view is that "the shell" is not part of "Unix" for interaction by the user. That is the first component of compatibility, then there is also the "program behavior" of compatibility that I also think is essential to Unix compatibility. comp.arch ( talk) 16:04, 22 July 2014 (UTC)
After having a quick read through the page I seem to have found a small discrepancy seen below:
Developed by Stephen Bourne at Bell Labs, it was a replacement for the Thompson shell...
The shell was designed as a replacement for the Mashey shell.
We should probably research this and seen which once is actually correct. Else, if it was created to replace both the Thompson and Mashey shell that should be made more clear. Else, if is was designed to replace the Mashey shell, but in reality it actually replaced the Thompson shell, then that also should be more clearly stated. -bsimmons 216.249.42.52 ( talk) 13:33, 29 September 2014 (UTC)
The Wikipedia " .sh" article says
I don't see ".sh" anywhere in this Bourne shell article. Is there a gap in the coverage of this article -- should it say something about ".sh"? Or should the ".sh" article point to some other article that mentions ".sh", perhaps shell script? -- DavidCary ( talk) 12:38, 19 June 2015 (UTC)
For the benefit of SCCS, a file n is copied from n.sh and made executable (by everyone). This is for shell scripts that are checked into SCCS. Since RCS preserves the execution permission of a file, you do not need to use this feature with RCS.
The article Bourne shell states that the Bourne shell was released in 1977, but the article Thompson shell states that the Bourne shell was released in 1979. Can anyone provide a reliable source settling the matter? The editor who uses the pseudonym " JamesBWatson" ( talk) 16:29, 27 November 2015 (UTC)
This is the
talk page for discussing improvements to the
Bourne shell article. This is not a forum for general discussion of the article's subject. |
Article policies
|
Find sources: Google ( books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL |
![]() | This article is rated C-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Hi, I can see the same errors on that page as on the one about "Unix shell".
The Bourne shell is generally no longer located as /bin/sh. It is only the case on some very rare systems (like Solaris cited above). Many systems don't have a Bourne shell at all anymore, and when they have one, it's generally either in a non standard place such as /usr/old/bin or has a different name such as bsh or sh.bourne. The sh code wasn't made free until very recently. That's why no Free Unix system ever had it (exception of early BSDs which was the cause of law suites, BSDs then adopted the Almquist shell which was a free reimplementation of the Bourne shell as it could be found on SysV with some extensions and has now been made POSIX (modern sh) conformant).
Many scripts are still written in a Bourne compatible syntax, but just because it is the greatest common denominator of the shs of the past and current Unices. sh is often confused with the Bourne shell because sh has been the Bourne shell on many systems for a long period of time.
So it's no longer a popular default shell either, nor is it the default login shell for root on many operating systems. sh is though.
And it's wrong to say it's standard on all commercial Unices.
See my comments on the Unix shell page for details.
Another error:
"for loops, in particular the use of $* to loop over arguments". That's incorrect. $* is the concatenation of the positional parameters. It's $@ when double quoted that allows to loop over the positional parameters, not $*. And "for" loops over the positional parameters by default, so there's no need to specify "$@":
for i do whatever "$i" done
(it's not for do od, but for do done in the Bourne shell)
I don't know if one can say that the Korn shell was written "much later" than csh. I believe it was started in the early eighties (read 1982 somewhere) so only 3 years after csh (I might be wrong on that one).
while ~ do ~ od
/bin/od
would have predated the Bourne shell syntax, and while ~ do ~ done
is correct. I can fix this right away. Are there any historical citations on why done
as used? The Bourne's original mac.h
file uses both, eg.FOR ~ DO ~ OD # for loop # WHILE cond DO ~ OD # early termination loop # REP ~ PER cond DONE # late termination loop # LOOP ~ POOL # infinite loop #
$*
vs "$@"
$@
originally, or it was added as an enhancement. I see a lot of $* in code even today that should be "$@". Was "$@" apart of the original design, or an enhancement? Need to check the original source tree somehow... I wonder if is still compiles... :-) (BTW IIRC csh used $*:q for "$@") --
NevilleDNZ
12:48, 10 September 2006 (UTC)I removed the paragraph under Descendants which talks about the C shell, because it's not a descendant of the Bourne shell (it ran The C shell (csh), derived not from the Bourne shell but the Thompson shell,&hellip). I incorporated the relevant (and only the relevant) context into the Korn shell's description; also improving the style somewhat. I hope it works for you. -- Rfsmit ( talk) 21:14, 21 July 2008 (UTC)
Should this page be retitled: Bourne shell; a history or Bourne shell; background?? and a link added to a page that actually talks about what the Bourne shell is/does? DGerman ( talk) 14:29, 29 January 2009 (UTC)
Bourne called them "shell procedures" not "shell scripts". Should this article follow his terminology? Geo Swan ( talk) 04:29, 1 February 2009 (UTC)
This article about sh starts with a screenshot of another shell, bash. Although the article claims that bash is a clone of sh (I do not agree), would it not be more enlightening to have instead a screenshot of the same program as is discussed in the article? For instance, the standard prompt in sh is "$", while in bash it is "user-name@host-name:/the/current/dir$". Also, colorisation by default is very uncommon for sh in my experience. To me, this is much like having a picture of a SAAB car in an Opel article, although you could claim that modern SAABs are simply Opel-clones (since many parts are compatible). 83.209.89.69 ( talk) 20:08, 27 June 2010 (UTC)
The list of features currently includes "Scripts can be invoked as commands by using their filename". Was this a feature of the Bourne shell, or of the Unix kernel? In modern Unices it's certainly a kernel feature. Qwertyus ( talk) 22:04, 2 February 2011 (UTC)
Solaris distributes a version of the Bourne shell using CDDL. However, the license as cited in this topic probably should reflect that of whoever is the owner of the legacy AT&T code. That's probably not Oracle/Sun. TEDickey ( talk) 10:49, 28 March 2011 (UTC)
well freeBsd has version the bourne shell under bsd lisence -- 82.44.40.210 ( talk) 14:37, 28 May 2011 (UTC)
/*
22 * UNIX shell 23 * 24 * S. R. Bourne 25 * Rewritten By David Korn 26 * AT&T Labs 27 * 28 */
I've given a reliable Source. Any person with some minimal basic knowlege in UNIX history or with minimal programmings skills will be able to understand that in contrary to you, I pointed to the Bourne Shell source. But even if both skills are missing, people who run a halfway POSIX compliant OS could compile the sources and check the behavior. And everybody who is able to compile, could run the Bourne Shell and compatible test script from http://www.in-ulm.de/~mascheck/various/whatshell/whatshell.sh to discover what shell he is using.
The Korn Shell is an halfway incompatible fork on the Bourne Shell source that started in 1982. I know of no serious person that would call the Korn Shell "a minor variant" of the Bourne Shell. Besides the Korn history editor, the main difference between Bourne Shell and Korn Shell is pipeline execution order. Korn Shell prints "test" with:
echo test | read var echo $var
while Bourne Shell prints an empty line. Sources published by AT&T after aprox. 1984 do not include the "S. R. Bourne" tag in either Bourne or Korn Shell. Korn Shell sources that directly come from David Korn still have that tag but nobody would see this as an indication for seeing the Bourne Shell itself.
Regarding Licensing: Modern (function supporting) versions of the Bourne Shell have been closed source until Sun published a recent Bourne Shell under CDDL in June 2005. No other OSS license applies to such a Burne Shell variant. AT&T gave the OK for putting ksh93 under CPL in 2001. Before, the Korn Shell (but not the Bourne Shell) was availabe under a non-OSI compliant license for a few years (IIRC since 1997).
The advanced and portable version of the Bourne Shell that I publish since 2006 has been derived from the only legal OSS source at: http://src.opensolaris.org/source/xref/onnv/onnv-gate/usr/src/cmd/sh It adds the interactive shell history editor, I wrote in 1982-1984 for my private shell independently from David Korn.
The problem I see frequently with you is that you are missing the needed skills to be able to discuss a topic but still act as if you were the only person on the planet that knows things right. Together with your agressive discussion style, this creates a bad taste. I encourage you to behave more cooperative to avoid unneeded disputes. -- Schily ( talk) 15:06, 23 March 2012 (UTC)
Meaning no slight to Schily, I wish to point out that his historical account errs in suggesting that Caldera International's 2002 release of many releases of historical Unix through 1979's v7 and 32V doesn't include Bourne shell. It doubtless was ridiculously antique, poorly portable, and in K&R rather than ANSI C, but I'd be extremely surprised if it weren't the real Stephen Bourne codebase in all its 1970s (obsolete) glory -- and under Caldera's BSD-ish licensing terms. This history can be traced through the Heirloom Bourne Shell repository. ~~ unixguy — Preceding unsigned comment added by 198.144.195.190 ( talk) 08:48, 9 August 2016 (UTC)
If you like features from above, there is only one license that gives you access, the CDDL.
BTW: The history cannot be traced in the so called heirloom shell as this shell just started with the OpenSolaris sources with no history inside and stopped all activities after approx. 6 months, before becoming fully portable. Because it is full of bugs, you do not really like to use the heirloom shell. Schily ( talk) 11:50, 9 August 2016 (UTC)
I believe the matter under discussion is what the licence of the legacy AT&T Bourne shell code is/was. This Wikipedia article overwhelmingly concerns the historic shell as it existed in primordial Unix times up through, say, SysV release 4.x, which, with all due respect to noble attempts to update the code such as Schily and his CDDL posse, is IMO the last time (nearly) anyone actually cared about the Bourne shell except as the inspiration for ksh, bash, ash/dash, and the POSIX shell spec. Thus the article's use of the past tense through essentially all of the article's main text. Thus, I submit that the correct licence to cite for this article is what Schily calls the 'Caldera license', which close inspection reveals to be a verbatim application of the 4-clause BSD license. ~~unixguy — Preceding unsigned comment added by 198.144.195.190 ( talk) 09:05, 12 August 2016 (UTC)
Claiming that my logic means the bash article should 'mention only what has been available in 1989' is making a blatantly non-sequitur appeal, as (obviously) said article does not concern the historic initial state of Mr. Brian Fox's contribution to the GNU Project -- as witness the fact that its Wikipedia page, by contrast, is phrased in the present tense. Essentially, by ignoring the substance of what I said and raising irrelevancies such as the gratuitous assertion about ksh, you are conceding the point (but continuing to argue anyway). Ah well. So, volunteers of the Wikipedia Project: There is your answer, and I'd recommend you cease wasting time arguing with Schily and (enfin) change the Article text from 'Under discussion' to '4-clause BSD'. That should then free up energies for more fruitful matters. ~~unixguy — Preceding unsigned comment added by 198.144.195.190 ( talk) 17:21, 13 August 2016 (UTC)
The article mentions that "It was released in 1977 in the Version 7 Unix release", however the Version_7_Unix article states that Version 7 Unix was released in 1979. Not both are right, or there is a trick. DelTree ( talk) 12:50, 30 January 2012 (UTC)
It does not sem to be serious to have a "Criticism" section that looks as it if has been written in early 1981 and assumes for correctness that we still are in 1981.
Today in 2012, the test utility is a built-in command since 31years.
Functions (that can act as aliases) are in the Bourhe Shell since 28 years.
Job Control is in the the Bourne Shell since 23 years.
A History and a command line history editor (which is more than csh had in 1981) is in since 5.5 years.
In other words, most of the features have been in the Bourne Shell before bash exists. Also the csh syntax not really a C-derived syntax either. Csh did offer a few features that help in interacetive use while the Bourne Shell has been written to be usable for interactive use and for scripts. -- Schily ( talk) 13:02, 12 May 2012 (UTC)
The introduction says that the Bourne shell "was a replacement for the Thompson shell", and the Origins sections says that "The shell was designed as a replacement for the Mashey shell." So which is it? Teemu Leisti ( talk) 08:18, 4 January 2013 (UTC)
I came here to say the same thing, 8 years later -- andrewh — Preceding unsigned comment added by 167.179.152.63 ( talk) 05:06, 14 December 2020 (UTC)
Should good places to learn the Bourne shell be a separate article?
A class given at UC Berkeley by Michael Paoli has a concise reference to learning the shell. http://www.rawbw.com/~mp/unix/sh/ From experience teaching scripting he recommends starting with the six page 1979 sh man page! http://plan9.bell-labs.com/7thEdMan/v7vol1.pdf
Another good answer for where beginners might productively start seems to be the "Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide" http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/ which despite the title doesn't start at the Advanced level. Advanced is where you will end up after reading it. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Grantbow ( talk • contribs) 09:45, 31 March 2013 (UTC)
First of all, I was under the mistaken (understandable?) impression that the Bourne shell was the original. I knew however that some systems substitute dash for sh (compatible) I think for programs. And I knew that user shells are selectable. Now my question is, is there a minimum amount of shell functionality that has been supported (and still is supported) in the "first considered" Unix shell? I know about the previous Thompson and PWB shells (are they the only previous shells?). Are they not considered Unix (anymore)? lintsh (should it be mentioned in the page?) inticates they are not important (or the Android shell?).
My (challenged) view is that "the shell" is not part of "Unix" for interaction by the user. That is the first component of compatibility, then there is also the "program behavior" of compatibility that I also think is essential to Unix compatibility. comp.arch ( talk) 16:04, 22 July 2014 (UTC)
After having a quick read through the page I seem to have found a small discrepancy seen below:
Developed by Stephen Bourne at Bell Labs, it was a replacement for the Thompson shell...
The shell was designed as a replacement for the Mashey shell.
We should probably research this and seen which once is actually correct. Else, if it was created to replace both the Thompson and Mashey shell that should be made more clear. Else, if is was designed to replace the Mashey shell, but in reality it actually replaced the Thompson shell, then that also should be more clearly stated. -bsimmons 216.249.42.52 ( talk) 13:33, 29 September 2014 (UTC)
The Wikipedia " .sh" article says
I don't see ".sh" anywhere in this Bourne shell article. Is there a gap in the coverage of this article -- should it say something about ".sh"? Or should the ".sh" article point to some other article that mentions ".sh", perhaps shell script? -- DavidCary ( talk) 12:38, 19 June 2015 (UTC)
For the benefit of SCCS, a file n is copied from n.sh and made executable (by everyone). This is for shell scripts that are checked into SCCS. Since RCS preserves the execution permission of a file, you do not need to use this feature with RCS.
The article Bourne shell states that the Bourne shell was released in 1977, but the article Thompson shell states that the Bourne shell was released in 1979. Can anyone provide a reliable source settling the matter? The editor who uses the pseudonym " JamesBWatson" ( talk) 16:29, 27 November 2015 (UTC)