Definition

Bash is a command language and shell for UNIX. It was developed as a free replacement for the Bourne shell. This language was written for the GNU Project. The language was initially released in the year 1989. Since then, Bash has been used and recognized widely, as it is the primary shell on most OS X and Linux distributions.

History of Bash

The work on the coding of Bash was started by Brian Fox on 10th of January, 1988. This job was assigned to Fox when Richard Stallman indicated that efficient efforts were not put in by the prior developer in the development of the language. The development of a free shell that has an ability to run the current shell scripts carried a lot of strategic importance in relation to the development of a free system from the codes of GNU and BSD.

This is why the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and Stallman funded this software all by themselves, and appointed Fox as an employee of FSF to speed up the development process. Version .99 of Bash, which was a beta version, was released by Fox on 8th of June, 1989. Fox held the position of the primary maintainer of the language for a considerable period of time, until FSF laid him off and replaced him by Chet Ramey by the mid of 1992 or 1994.

After that, Bash has attained the position of the most popular shell among the people who use Linux. In addition, it also became the default shell on a number of distributions of the Linux operating system (Bash was the default shell for interactive purposes; the Almquist, on the other hand, was the default shell for scripting purposes) as well as the OS X of Apple.

Apart from that, this language has been distributed to Cygwin and MinGW, Microsoft Windows, DOS, Android, and Novell NetWare and Android. This has been done through the usage of terminal emulation applications. During the Build Conference of 2016, Microsoft indicated that Windows 10 will include a Linux subsystem that will extend full support to Bash and other Ubuntu binaries running natively in Windows.

In the year 2014, a bug associated with Bash was discovered by Stéphane Chazelas. This bug was called Shellshock and was given the following numbers CVE-2014-6277, CVE-2014-7169, and CVE-2014-6271. The bug was associated with the manner in which Bash passed the function definitions to subshells via various environment variables.

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