Intro to Bash

Bash Shell

Bash Shell

Knowing how to program with bash scripting languages makes our interaction with the Linux OS easier, productive and (based on IBM’s page)fun.

Bash is a free software Unix shell written for the GNU Project. Its name is an acronym which stands for Bourne-again shell. The name is a pun on the name of the Bourne shell (sh), an early and important Unix shell written by Stephen Bourne and distributed with Version 7 Unix circa 1978, and “born again”. Bash was created in 1987 by Brian Fox. In 1990 Chet Ramey became the primary maintainer.

Bash is the default shell on most systems built on top of the Linux kernel as well as on Mac OS X and it can be run on most Unix-like operating systems. It has also been ported to Microsoft Windows using Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications (SUA), or POSIX emulation provided by Cygwin and MSYS. It has been ported to MS-DOS by the DJGPP project and to Novell NetWare.

The improvements offered by BASH include:

  • Command line editing
  • Unlimited size command history
  • Job Control
  • Shell Functions and Aliases
  • Indexed arrays of unlimited size
  • Integer arithmetic in any base from two to sixty-four

The official bash manual is available online at www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/.

You can download bash at
http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/bash/
or on one of its mirrors.

Sources:

http://www.gnu.org/software/bash/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bash

About these ads

One Response to Intro to Bash

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s