1-Bourne shell (sh)

This is the original Unix shell written by Steve Bourne of Bell Labs. It is avai
lable on all UNIX systems.
This shell does not have the interactive facilites provided by modern shells suc
h as the C shell and Korn shell
The binary program of the Bourne shell or a compatible program is located at /bi
n/sh on most Unix systems.

2-dash

dash: Debian Almquist shell (dash) is a POSIX-compliant Unix shell, much smaller
than bash. It requires less disk space but is also less feature rich. dash is a
direct descendant of the NetBSD version of the Almquist Shell (ash). It was por
ted to Linux by Herbert Xu in early 1997. It was renamed to dash in 2002.dash ex
ecutes scripts faster than bash and depends on fewer libraries. It is believed t
o be more reliable in case of upgrade problems or disk failures.

3-bash

bash: Bash is a Unix shell written for the GNU Project. The name of the actual e
xecutable is bash. Its name is an acronym for Bourne-again shell, a pun on the n
ame of the Bourne shell (sh) (i.e. Bourne again or born again ), an early and importa
nt Unix shell written by Stephen Bourne and distributed with Version 7 Unix circ
a 1978. Bash was created in 1987 by Brian Fox. In 1990 Chet Ramey became the pri
mary maintainer. Bash is the default shell on most Linux systems as well as on M
ac OS X and it can be run on most Unix-like operating systems.

4-fish

fish is a Unix shell. Its name is an acronym for friendly interactive shell. fis
h focuses on interactive use, discoverability, and user friendliness. The design
goal of fish is to give the user a rich set of powerful features in a way that
is easy to discover, remember, and use.

5-ksh

The Korn shell (ksh) is a Unix shell which was developed by David Korn (AT&T Bel
l Laboratories) in the early 1980s. It is backwards compatible with the Bourne s
hell and includes many features of the C shell as well, such as a command histor
y, which was inspired by the requests of Bell Labs users. The main advantage of
ksh over the traditional Unix shell is in its use as a programming language. Sin
ce its conception, several features were gradually added, while maintaining stro
ng backwards compatibility with the Bourne shell.
6-csh

The C shell (csh) is a Unix shell developed by Bill Joy for the BSD Unix system.
It was originally derived from the 6th Edition Unix /bin/sh (which was the Thom
pson shell), the predecessor of the Bourne shell. Its syntax is modeled after th
e C programming language. The C shell added many feature improvements over the B
ourne shell, such as aliases and command history. Today, the original C shell is
not in wide use on Unix; it has been superseded by other shells such as the Ten
ex C shell (tcsh) based on the original C shell code, but adding filename comple
tion and command line editing, comparable with the Korn shell (ksh), and the GNU
Bourne-Again shell (bash).

7-ash

The Almquist shell (also known as A Shell or ash) was originally Kenneth Almquis
t s clone of the SVR4-variant of the Bourne shell; it is a fast, small, POSIX-comp
atible Unix shell designed to replace the Bourne shell in later BSD distribution
s. By intention it did not feature line editing or command history mechanisms or
iginally, because Almquist felt that such should be moved into the terminal driv
er. Current variants have emacs and vi modes.

8-tcsh

tcsh (pronounced TC-Shell or T-shell ) is a Unix shell based on and compatible with t
he C shell (csh). It is essentially the C shell with (programmable) filename com
pletion, command-line editing, and a few other features.

9-es

The es shell is a command line interpreter that uses a scripting language simila
r to the rc shell. It is intended to provide a fully functional programming lang
uage as a Unix shell. The bulk of es development occurred in the early 1990s. Unl
ike other modern shells, es does not have job control. Patches to provide job co
ntrol have been offered, but the currently available ones have memory leak probl
ems.

10-rc

rc is the command line interpreter for Version 10 Unix, Plan 9, and Inferno oper
ating systems. It resembles the Bourne shell, but its syntax is somewhat simpler
. It was created by Tom Duff, who is better known for an unusual C programming l
anguage construct called Duff s device.

11-scsh
Scsh is a POSIX API layered on top of the Scheme programming language (currently
only a Scheme 48 implementation exists, but others are planned) in a manner to
make the most of scheme s capability for scripting. It is limited to 32-bit platfo
rms.

12-sash

Stand-alone shell (sash) is a Unix shell designed for use in recovering from cer
tain types of system failures. The built in commands of sash have all libraries
linked statically, so unlike most shells, the standard UNIX commands do not rely
on external libraries. For example the copy command (cp) requires linux-gate.so
, libc.so, and ld-linux.so when built from GNU coreutils on Linux. If any of the
se libraries get corrupted, the coreutils cp command would not work, however in
sash, the built-in command, cp, would be unaffected.

13-zsh

The Z shell (zsh) is a Unix shell that can be used as an interactive login shell
and as a powerful command interpreter for shell scripting. Zsh can be thought o
f as an extended bourne shell with a large number of improvements, including som
e of the most useful features of bash, ksh, and tcsh.