Page "Unix shell" Paragraph 10

The Bourne shell was one of the major shells used in early versions of the Unix operating system and became a de facto standard.

It was written by Stephen Bourne at Bell Labs and was first distributed with Version 7 Unix, circa 1977.

Every Unix-like system has at least one shell compatible with the Bourne shell.

The Bourne shell program name is < tt > sh </ tt > and it is typically located in the Unix file system hierarchy at < tt >/ bin / sh </ tt >.

On many systems, however, < tt >/ bin / sh </ tt > may be a symbolic link or hard link to a compatible, but more feature-rich shell than the Bourne shell.

The POSIX standard specifies its standard shell as a strict subset of the Korn shell.

From a user's perspective the Bourne shell was immediately recognized when active by its characteristic default command line prompt character, the dollar sign ($).