The
Bourne shell (
sh) is a
shell (computing), or
command-line interpreter, for computer
operating systems.
The Bourne shell was the default
Unix shell of
Unix Version 7. Most Unix-like systems continue to have
/bin/sh—which will be the Bourne shell, or a
symbolic link or hard link to a compatible shell even when other shells are used by most users.
Developed by
Stephen Bourne at
Bell Labs, it was a replacement for the
Thompson shell, whose executable file had the same name—
sh. It was released in 1977 in the
Version 7 Unix release distributed to colleges and universities. Although it is used as an interactive command interpreter, it was always intended as a
scripting language and contains most of the features that are commonly considered to produce structured programs.
It gained popularity with the publication of
The UNIX Programming Environment by
Brian W. Kernighan and
Rob Pike—the first commercially published book that presented the shell as a programming language in a tutorial form.