Almquist shell (also known as A Shell, ash and sh) is a lightweight Unix shell originally written by Kenneth Almquist in the late 1980s. Initially a clone of the System V.4 variant of the Bourne shell, it replaced the original Bourne shell in the BSD versions of Unix released in the early 1990s.

Mar 29, 2025 · The Almquist Shell, a.k.a. ash, is a minimal implementation of an almost- POSIX shell, and also a replacement for the Bourne Shell. Ash has more features than the original Bourne Shell, but fewer features than most other shells; for example, it lacks arrays.

Dash (Debian Almquist shell) is a modern POSIX-compliant implementation of /bin/sh (sh, Bourne shell). Dash is not Bash compatible, but Bash tries to be mostly compatible with POSIX, and thus Dash.

Manual of the original Almquist shell nroff source postprocessed with man2html plus fixups (.ta table, .IR syntax) for current nroff

First, a few summaries for orientation, what it's about with these almquist shells. Differences between the ash family and the SVR4 shell: the file DIFFERENCES from the original distribution lists most remaining differences to both the Berkeley shell (a …

Mar 4, 2022 · Historically, ash is the Almquist Shell. What does it mean to be "sh compatible"? gives its history in the overall context of sh -style shells, and Where to find the source code for the Almquist Shell? explains where to find it.

Apr 14, 2016 · The two widely used variants of ash nowadays are dash, which has a repository on kernel.org, and the Busybox ash, which has its own repository. The Almquist Shell variants page lists many variants and provides links to their source code, including the original post on Usenet.

Feb 4, 2025 · dash is the Debian Almquist shell: a small, fast, and POSIX -compliant shell. It is well-suited for startup scripts, and is used on Debian (and derivative distributions) as /bin/sh.

Dash is a Unix shell, specifically the Debian Almquist Shell, that aims to be a lightweight and efficient alternative to other shells like Bash. It is a modern implementation of the POSIX standard shell (sh) and is not fully compatible with the Bash shell.

Dec 19, 2022 · Ash, originally known as Almquist Shell, also known by other names such as “a Shell” or “Sh” is a lightweight UNIX Shell, developed by Kenneth Almquist.