Heroes in a Bash Shell

Shells make large-scale IT possible. They’re a necessary
component to modern computing. But it might not have turned out
that way without a lot of hard work from a developer at the Free
Software Foundation named Brian Fox. Now, the Bash shell is
shipped with almost every computer in the world.


In the ‘70s, Bell Labs wanted to automate sequences of
repetitive, complex commands. Chet Ramey describes how Bell
developed several shells—but there could be only one officially
supported shell for UNIX. Enter the Bourne shell. Though it was
the best of that crop, the Bourne shell had its limits. And it
was only available with a limited UNIX license. Brian J. Fox
recounts his time at the Free Software Foundation where he needed
to create a free—as in speech—version of the Bourne shell. It had
to be compatible without using any elements of the original
source code. That Bourne-Again Shell, aka Bash, is possibly the
most widely used software in the planet. And Taz Brown describes
how it’s one of the most important tools a developer can learn to
use.


You can dive deeper into the story of Bash, or any of the
programming languages we cover this season, if you head over to
the show’s site at redhat.com/commandlineheroes


Follow along with the episode transcript.