Which Shell?
There are at least a dozen Unix shells floating around, but they're all based on two major flavors: Bourne Shell (sh) and C Shell (csh). The most important shells in the Unix and Linux world are the Bourne Shell, C Shell, Korn Shell (a descendant of C Shell), and Bourne Again Shell (bash).
The original command shell of note is the Bourne Shell, written by Steven Bourne at AT&T Bell Labs in the early days of Unix. It's probably still on your Unix box as /bin/sh, and while it's not sexy, and its syntax may be a bit odd, it's a simple and powerful scripting environment so sufficiently common across Unixes that it's the lingua franca of the shell scripting world.
The Free Software Foundation's open source reimplementation of the Bourne ...
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