From Wikibooks, the open-content textbooks collection

Wikipedia has related information at Bourne Again Shell

This wikibook is loosely based on the GNU Bash Reference Manual from Chet Ramey and Brian Fox

[edit] Introduction

This book will try to enlighten every reader on every aspect of the Bourne Again SHell (BASH), as a shell and as scripting language.

Bash is the most popular shell and scripting language for the GNU operating system. The name is an acronym for the 'Bourne-Again SHell', a pun on Stephen Bourne, the author of the direct ancestor of the current Unix shell /bin/sh.

Bash is largely compatible with sh and incorporates useful features from the Korn shell and the C shell. It offers functional improvements over sh for both interactive and programming use.

While the GNU operating system provides other shells, including a version of csh, Bash is the default shell. Like other GNU software, Bash is quite portable. It currently runs on nearly every version of Unix and a few other operating systems - independently-supported ports exist for MS-DOS, OS/2 and Windows.