The A-Z of Programming Languages: BASH/Bourne-Again Shell

Computerworld is undertaking a series of investigations into the most widely-used programming languages. Previously we spoke to Alfred v. Aho of AWK fame, and in this article we chat to Chet Ramey about his experience maintaining Bash.

Bash, or the Bourne-Again Shell is a Unix shell created in 1987 by Brian Fox. According to Wikipedia, the name is a pun on an earlier Unix shell by Stephen Bourne (called the Bourne shell), which was distributed with Version 7 Unix in 1978.

In 1990, Chet Ramey, Manager of the Network Engineering and Security Group in Technology Infrastructure Services at Case Western Reserve University, became the primary maintainer of the language.

Computerworld tracked down Ramey to find out more.

How did you first become involved with Bash?

In 1989 or so, I was doing network services and server support for [Case Western Reserve] University (CWRU), and was not satisfied with the shells I had available for that work. I wasn't really interested in using sh for programming and csh/tcsh for interactive use, so I began looking around for a version of sh with the interactive features I wanted (job control, line editing, command history, filename completion, and so on.)

I found a couple of versions of the SVR2 shell where those features had been added (credit to Doug Gwyn, Ron Natalie, and Arnold Robbins, who had done the work). These were available to CWRU because we were Unix source licensees, but I had trouble with them and couldn't extend them the way I wanted. Ken Almquist was writing ASH, but that had not been released, and there was a clone of the 7th edition shell, which eventually became PDksh, but that did not have the features I wanted either.

Brian Fox had begun writing BASH and readline (which was not, at that time, a separate library) the year before, when he was an employee of the FSF. The story, as I recall it, was that a volunteer had come forward and offered to write a Bourne Shell clone. After some time, he had produced nothing, so Richard Stallman directed Brian to write a shell. Stallman said it should take only a couple of months.

I started looking again, and ended up finding a very early version of Bash. I forget where I got it, but it was after Brian had sent a copy to Paul Placeway from Ohio State -- Paul had been the tcsh maintainer for many years, and Brian asked him to help with the line editing and redisplay code. I took that version, made job control work and fixed a number of other bugs, and sent my changes to Brian. He was impressed enough to begin working with me, and we went on from there.

I fixed many of the bugs people reported in the first public versions of BASH and fed those fixes back to Brian. We began working together as more or less co-maintainers, and when Brian moved on to other things, I still needed to support Bash for my local users, so I produced several local releases. Brian and I eventually merged those versions together, and when he moved away from Bash development, I took over.

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