FreeBSD® Unleashed

Types of Shells Available

There are a lot of different shells available for FreeBSD, ranging from bare-bones to loaded with features. We aren't going to talk about all of the shells here, but we will look at some of the more popular ones. Let's begin with the earliest shell that is still in common use: the Bourne shell, commonly known as sh.

The Bourne Shell (sh)

The original Bourne shell was developed at Bell Labs by Steven Bourne for the AT&T UNIX operating system. FreeBSD, like many other versions of UNIX, has replaced the Bourne shell with the POSIX shell, which is basically an enhanced version of the Bourne shell that supports things such as command-line editing, command history, and aliases—all things that the original Bourne shell did ...