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The Bourne shell is a historical implementation of /bin/sh

The Bourne shell was the implementation of /bin/sh on Unix systems for a long time, from Version 7 Unix in 1977 to the the early 2000s. It was the starting point for the POSIX shell standard, which builds on the Bourne shell adds a few features, mostly from ksh. It has now mostly been phased out in favor of other implementations that follow the POSIX standard, such as ksh , bash and various flavors of ash (e.g. . The Bourne shell is not free software and thus is not available on Linux or BSD.

Use this tag only for questions about genuine Bourne shells. For questions about Bourne/POSIX-style shells in general, use .