Different Types of Shell

Different Types of Shell

Bourne shell (sh) 

•  Original UNIX shell written by Steve Bourne of Bell Labs, which is available on all UNIX systems.

•  Does not have the interactive facilities provided by modern shells. (e.g. C shell and Korn shell) 

•  Permits shell scripts to be written and executed.  

C shell (csh)

•  Provides a C-like language with which to write shell scripts.

TC shell (tcsh) 

•  Available in the public domain.

•  Provides all the features of the C shell together with emacs style editing of the command line.

Korn shell (ksh) 

•  Shell written by David Korn of Bell labs, which is now provided as the standard shell on UNIX systems.

•  It provides all the features of the C and TC shells  together with a shell programming language similar to  that of the original Bourne shell.

•  It is the most efficient shell. 

•  Advice: use this as your standard interactive shell

Bourne Again SHell (bash) 

•  This is a public domain shell written by the Free Software Foundation under their GNU initiative. 

•  Widely used within the academic community.

•  Provides all the interactive features of the C shell (csh) and the Korn shell (ksh). 

•  Its programming language for shell scripts is compatible with the Bourne shell (sh).

•  If Bourne shell (sh) is used for shell programming, bash is recommended as a complete shell

environment.