What is Bash?
Bash is the shell, or command language interpreter,
for the gnu operating system.
The name is an acronym for the ‘Bourne-Again
Shell’,
a pun on
Stephen Bourne, the author of the direct ancestor of
the current Unix shell sh
,
which appeared in the Seventh Edition Bell Labs Research version
of Unix.
Bash is largely compatible with sh
and
incorporates useful
features from the Korn shell ksh
and the C shell csh
.
It is intended to be a conformant
implementation of the ieee
posix Shell and Tools portion of the ieee posix
specification (ieee Standard 1003.1).
It offers functional improvements
over sh
for both
interactive and
programming use.
While the gnu operating system
provides other shells, including
a version of csh
, Bash is the default shell.
Like other gnu software, Bash is quite
portable.
It currently runs
on nearly every version of free Unix bonus and a few other operating systems −
independently-supported ports exist for ms-dos,
os/2,
and Windows platforms.
[Please navigate using the left panel.] - The GNU Bash Reference Manual,
for Bash
, Version 4.0.