Shell history

[Ed Gould]

In article <71 at cascade.ARPA> griff at cascade.UUCP (Peter Griffin) writes:
>If csh was developed BEFORE sh, what shell was it developed under?

Why, sh, of course!  Actually the name sh has been applied to several
different programs.  In all Unix systems (at least from V5 on) there
is a shell named sh.  Bourne's "Algol" shell didn't get released until
V7.  There were also the V6 shell, and the PWB shell, and many others.
Csh's precursor was once called nsh, for "new" shell; it was basically
an enhanced V6 shell without csh's C-like syntax.  It may have even
been called sh on some machines.

When we first got V7 at UC, we considered abandoning the Bourne
shell, or perhaps renaming it, and installing csh as sh.  We finally
rejected the idea because there were too many scripts to convert, and
that the Bourne shell is a more efficient interpreter for scripts.

-- 
Ed Gould                    mt Xinu, 2910 Seventh St., Berkeley, CA  94710  USA
{ucbvax,decvax}!mtxinu!ed   +1 415 644 0146

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