Shell Versions
Our exploration of extended shells brings up the good point that it's useful occasionally to be able to find the version number of various shells. Here's how:
$bash --version
bash GNU bash, version 3.00.16(1)-release (i686-pc-linux-gnu) ... $ksh --version
Recent ksh93 only version sh (AT&T Labs Research) 1993-12-28 p $ksh
Older ksh $^V
Type ^V $ Version 11/16/88f ksh shows version $echo 'echo $KSH_VERSION' | pdksh
pdksh @(#)PD KSH v5.2.14 99/07/13.2 $echo 'echo $ZSH_VERSION' | zsh
zsh 4.1.1
There appears to be no way to get a version number from /bin/sh
. This is not surprising. Most true
Bourne shells on commercial Unix systems are descended from the System V
Release 3 (1987) or Release 4 (1989) Bourne shell, and have changed
little or not at all since then. Commercial vendors wishing to supply a
POSIX-compliant shell generally do so by adapting some version of the
Korn shell for that purpose.
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