4.2. The History
of the Shell
When AT&T software engineers Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson
were designing UNIX™, they
wanted to create a way for people to interact with their new
system.
Operating systems at that time came with command interpreters,
which could take commands from the user and interpret them into
something computers could use.
But Ritchie and Thompson wanted something more, something that
offered better features than the command interpreters available at
that time. This led to the development of the Bourne shell (known
as sh), created by S.R. Bourne. Since the
creation of the Bourne shell, other shells have been developed,
such as the C shell (csh) and the Korn
shell (ksh).
When the Free Software Foundation sought a royalty-free shell,
developers began to work on the language behind the Bourne shell as
well as some of the popular features from other shells available at
the time.
The result was the Bourne Again Shell, or bash. Although your Red Hat Enterprise Linux system
includes several different shells, bash is
the default shell for interactive users. You can learn more about
bash by reading the bash man page (type man
bash at a shell prompt).
