Almquist shell
From Free net encyclopedia
The Almquist shell or A Shell (ash) originally was Kenneth Almquist's clone of the SVR4-variant of the Bourne shell; it is a fast, small, POSIX-compatible Unix shell designed to replace the Bourne shell in later BSD distributions. By intention it did not feature line editing or history mechanisms originally, because Almquist felt that such should be moved into the terminal driver. Current variants have emacs and vi modes added.
ash is installed as the default shell (/bin/sh) on NetBSD and Minix.
Some Linux distributions, such as Naked Lady, also use the Almquist Shell as the default shell, although the Bourne Again Shell is more popular.
The following is extracted from the Slackware package information:
- ash (Kenneth Almquist's ash shell)
- A lightweight (92K) Bourne compatible shell. Great for machines with low memory, but does not provide all the extras of shells like bash, tcsh, and zsh. Runs most shell scripts compatible with the Bourne shell. Note that under Linux, most scripts seem to use at least some bash-specific syntax. The Slackware setup scripts are a notable exception, since ash is the shell used on the install disks. NetBSD uses ash as its /bin/sh.
Note: On Debian, The Almquist Shell is known as Debian Almquist Shell (Dash).