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Concept
Bourne shell
Summary
The Bourne shell (sh) 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 /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 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.
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 First appearing in Version 7 Unix, the Bourne shell superseded the Mashey shell.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:
To allow shell scripts to be used as filters.
To provide programmability including control flow and variables.
Control over all input/output s.
Control over signal handling within scripts.
No limits on string lengths when interpreting shell scripts.
Rationalize and generalize string quoting mechanism.
The environment mechanism. This allowed context to be established at startup and provided a way for shell scripts to pass context to sub scripts (processes) without having to use explicit positional parameters.
Features of the Version 7 UNIX Bourne shell include:
Scripts can be invoked as commands by using their filename
May be used interactively or non-interactively
Allows both synchronous and asynchronous execution of commands
Supports input and output redirection and pipelines
Provides a set of built-in commands
Provides flow control constructs and quotation facilities.
Official source
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