Bourne Shell - Origins

Origins

The shell was designed as a replacement for the Mashey shell.

Among the primary goals were:

  • To allow shell scripts to be used as filters.
  • To provide programmability including control flow and variables.
  • Control over all input/output file descriptors.
  • 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.

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