Description

Osh(1) is an enhanced, backward-compatible port of the Sixth Edition (V6) UNIX shell (circa 1975), aka the Thompson shell. The original Thompson shell was principally written by Ken Thompson of Bell Labs.

Sh6(1) (a port of the original shell) and glob6(1) (a port of the global command) are also included in this package. Together, they provide a user interface which is backward compatible with that provided by the Sixth Edition Thompson shell and global command, but without the obvious enhancements found in osh.

Additionally, this package includes the following shell utilities:

• if(1) - conditional command (ported from Sixth Edition UNIX)
• goto(1) - transfer command (ported from Sixth Edition UNIX)
• fd2(1) - redirect file descriptor 2

The osh project also has a Gophersite (accessible with any Gopher client or Web browser that supports the Gopher protocol).

Download

Sources contains the latest official release (see below) and several older, unsupported releases.

• osh-20080629.tar.gz - latest official release and its checksums

Please contact me if you have any comments or questions about this software. Bug reports are certainly welcome, but please try upgrading to the latest official release before reporting any bug as it may have already been fixed. New releases of the osh project are announced on freshmeat.net.

Notes

The Thompson shell's command language is rather minimal when compared with more recent UNIX shells. However, since the Thompson shell initially set the stage for basic UNIX-shell functionality, all standard, commonly used, current UNIX shells still have a great deal in common with it.

The Thompson shell supports command pipelines (constructed with | or ^), both sequential (;) and asynchronous commands (&), I/O redirection (<, >, >>), globbing (*, ?, [...]), and parameter substitution ($1, $2, $3), among other things.

The NOTES file contains further information about these ports of the shell. In addition, here are some example command files (aka shell scripts) which may help to illustrate some of their capabilities. Last but not least, here are some example rc files which may help the user wishing to use osh interactively to better understand how to configure the environment.

Fun

I created a little quiz about Ancient Research UNIX (only V1 through V7). Test your knowledge of UNIX history and the shell by taking the quiz if you like.

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