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.
Read more about this topic: Bourne Shell
Famous quotes containing the word origins:
“The origins of clothing are not practical. They are mystical and erotic. The primitive man in the wolf-pelt was not keeping dry; he was saying: “Look what I killed. Aren’t I the best?””
—Katharine Hamnett (b. 1948)
“Lucretius
Sings his great theory of natural origins and of wise conduct; Plato
smiling carves dreams, bright cells
Of incorruptible wax to hive the Greek honey.”
—Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962)
“Compare the history of the novel to that of rock ‘n’ roll. Both started out a minority taste, became a mass taste, and then splintered into several subgenres. Both have been the typical cultural expressions of classes and epochs. Both started out aggressively fighting for their share of attention, novels attacking the drama, the tract, and the poem, rock attacking jazz and pop and rolling over classical music.”
—W. T. Lhamon, U.S. educator, critic. “Material Differences,” Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s, Smithsonian (1990)