Why the BASH shell is called BASH?

·

2 min read

Note: I always wanted to write posts that are useful to others. But I have a perfection problem and I am not getting shit done. To stop procrastinating in the name of perfection, I decided to post small things that are imperfect. This is one such post, it may not be a good one or a useful one. I hope the internet will go easy on me.

I like to take an occasional trip down the history lane. It is good to know how things were used to be and how they transformed into the current state. Today I was reading about the different terminal shells and learned how the BASH shell got its name.

Before that, if you want to know what a shell is, It is the program that actually processes commands and returns the output. Most shells also manage foreground and background processes, command history, and command-line editing. It is what we use in the terminal to get things done.

There are a lot of shells available nowadays such as zsh , fish and nushell. However, the first decent shell that allowed scripting and control flow was the Bourne Shell. It is created in the BELL Labs by Stephen Bourne. It is created in the year of 1979 and included as the default shell in Unix version 7. Based on this shell, ever Unix based system still has a compatible shell located in /bin/sh. That shell was named as Bourne shell, shortly known as sh.

After nearly two decades, a lot has changed and a new shell is created by Brian Fox in 1989. It was named as Bourne Again Shell, shortly known as BASH. This might be one of the most used shells as it is the default in most Linux flavors and in Mac OS.

So that's the end of this super useless post. Roast me in the comments.