[CentOS] Real sh? Or other efficient shell for non-interactive scripts

Fri Apr 24 19:47:55 UTC 2015
Stephen Harris <lists at spuddy.org>

On Fri, Apr 24, 2015 at 10:38:25AM -0400, m.roth at 5-cent.us wrote:
> Fascinating. As I'd been in Sun OS, and started doing admin work when it
> became Solaris, I'd missed that bit. A question: did the license agreement
> include payment, or was it just restrictive on distribution?

In 1990, when I started using ksh88, it was totally commercial.  Binaries
were $$$ and source was $$$$.  We bought the source and compiled it for
SunOS, Ultrix and various SYSVr[23] machines (one machine was so old it
didn't understand #! and so needed it placed as /bin/sh).

By 1998, ksh93 was free (as in beer) but was restricted distribution.
Eventually ksh93 became properly free, but by this point bash was
already popular in the Free-nix arena and had even made it into
Solaris, AIX and others.

> I didn't know bash till I got to CentOS (I don't remember it in RH 9...),

Yes it was.  It was in RH(not EL) 4, which was the first RH I used.

Even the 0.11 "boot+root" combination from 1991 had a version of bash in it!
  http://gunkies.org/wiki/Linux_0.11
(that was the first Linux version I used)

-- 

rgds
Stephen