History
ash was first released via a posting to the comp.sources.unix Usenet news group, approved and moderated by Rich Salz on May 30, 1989. It was described as "a reimplementation of the System V shell 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.
Ash has since been replaced on both Debian and Ubuntu. Dash became the replacement for ash in Debian and was expected to be the default /bin/sh for Debian Lenny. Dash became the default /bin/sh in Ubuntu starting with the 6.10 release in October 2006.
Read more about this topic: Almquist Shell
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