Windows Server® 2012 Unleashed

A Short History of Shells

The first shell in wide use was the Bourne shell, the standard user interface for the UNIX operating system; UNIX systems still require it for booting. This robust shell provided pipelines and conditional and recursive command execution. It was developed by C programmers for C programmers.

Oddly, however, despite being written by and for C programmers, the Bourne shell didn’t have a C-like coding style. This lack of similarity to the C language drove the invention of the C shell, which introduced more C-like programming structures. While the C shell inventors were building a better mousetrap, they decided to add command-line editing and command aliasing (defining command shortcuts), which eased the bane of every UNIX ...