BASH (UNIX shell)

Bourne Again SHell (BASH) is a variant of the Bourne shell, the standard UNIX shell written by Stephen Bourne in 1975. BASH is the most popular of the free, new generation shells.

URLs:

Bash Features - Bourne Shell Features

This section briefly summarizes elements Bash inherits from the Bourne shell and lists significant differences.

BASH Specific Features

Special features of bash.

Print References:

• Learning the Bash Shell. By Cameron Newham and Bill Rosenblatt. O'Reilly & Associates. 1995. (ISBN: 1-56592-147-X).

Detail:

BASH is a public domain shell written by the Free Software Foundation under their GNU free-software initiative. Widely used in the academic community, it combines the compatibility of the Bourne programming language with all of the interactive features of the C shell and the Korn shell. Any shell script written in the standard Bourne shell should work with BASH. Unlike the Korn shell, it is available without charge.

One feature BASH has that other shells lack is functions. These are more powerful than aliases; they may perform arbitrary actions with parameters and work just like shell scripts.