Unix Shell - Bourne Shell

Bourne Shell

The Bourne shell was one of the major shells used in early versions of the Unix operating system and became a de facto standard. It was written by Stephen Bourne at Bell Labs and was first distributed with Version 7 Unix, circa 1977. Every Unix-like system has at least one shell compatible with the Bourne shell. The Bourne shell program name is sh and it is typically located in the Unix file system hierarchy at /bin/sh. On many systems, however, /bin/sh may be a symbolic link or hard link to a compatible, but more feature-rich shell than the Bourne shell. The POSIX standard specifies its standard shell as a strict subset of the Korn shell. From a user's perspective the Bourne shell was immediately recognized when active by its characteristic default command line prompt character, the dollar sign ($).