Ash (Almquist Shell) Variants

Summary

Bourne | Ash | #! | find | ARG_MAX | Shells | whatshell | portability | permissions | UUOC | ancient | - | ../Various | HOME "$@" | echo/printf | set -e | test | tty defs | tty chars | $() vs ) | IFS | using siginfo | nanosleep | line charset | locale Ash (Almquist Shell) Variants 2006-02-14 .. 2021-02-13 (see recent changes) After I had repeatedly wondered how all those "ash" variants might be related, and had found hardly any information, I had a closer look at the variants I know. Source is available for all variants, except for BSD/OS. Thanks to TUHS for archiving the traditional BSDs and 386BSD, to Kirk McKusick for his CSRG archive, and to Peter Seebach for allowing me to learn all BSD/OS variants. This page documents relationships. And for the variants without changelogs (the traditional BSDs, 386BSD, BSD/OS and Minix) this page aims at being a complete log concerning source code changes. But for the other, later variants this was certainly not the goal and just a few, arbitrarily chosen changes or bugfixes are listed. Why no commented diffs? I won't manage to do that work. And if you're interested on this level, then you are looking at the source already and these comments are a good start. Content: · 1.) Original release '89 · 2.) Traditional BSDs: 4.3BSD-Net/2 '91, 4.4BSD-Alpha '92, 4.4BSD '93, 4.4BSD-Lite '94, 4.4BSD-Lite2 '95 · 3.) 386BSD '92-'93 · 4.) BSD/OS (BSDi) '91-'03 · 5.) NetBSD '93- · 6.) FreeBSD '96- · 7.) early port from NetBSD to Linux '93 (and early Slackware, Debian) · 8.) dash '97- (and later Slackware) · 9.) Slackware variant of dash '06- · 10.) Android variant (derived from NetBSD) '05- · 11.) Cygwin variants of ash '98- · 12.) BusyBox '01- · 13.) Minix '01- Illustration of the family tree (click for an increased size). 1.) Original release ('89) - sh(1) It was written by Kenneth Almquist as replacement to the traditional "System V Release 4" Bourne shell due to the license war between AT&T and Berkeley. Berkeley distributed it first wit...