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About the Bourne Shell familiy.

A rough english translation of a modified and updated extract from a usenet posting from Gunnar Ritter in de.comp.os.unix.shell, <3B9529F8.2RV1IN16U@bigfoot.de>, posting 136 (local copy of that posting).

• Ancient BSD variant of the v7 shell, without functions.
  (Ultrix-sh, System III, 4.2 BSD)

• Plain SVR2 shell with functions and many other small improvements. Still without modern "$@".
  (Ultrix-sh5)

• A variant based on SVR2. 8-bit clean.
  (OSF1?[1])

• A variant based on SVR2 with evaluation of LC_COLLATE for range expressions, multi-byte globbing.
  (HP-UX 9, HP-UX 10)

• SVR3.x shell with modern "$@" and "getopts".
  (SunOS 4, SCO OpenServer, AIX 3, AIX 4, MUNIX 3)

• SVR4 shell with job control [2].
  (SunOS 5, IRIX 5, IRIX 6 [3], SINIX(?))

• SVR4.2 shell with "read -r", "mldmode" und "priv" and (years after the first definition) SVID error message "UX:sh: ERROR: ...".
  (UnixWare, DG/UX?)

[1] sh both on OSF1/V4 and /V5 doesn't pay attention to LC_COLLATE but seems to be 8-bit clean (concerning LC_CTYPE, isprint()).

[2] background jobs in sh(1) - in contrast to jsh(1) - have the same processgroup, so if you log out, all bg jobs get a SIGHUP.

[3] From IRIX 6.4 on, sh (then called bsh) provides ${parameter##pattern} expansion, for the pattern "*/" only. The reason is: /sbin/builtin_exec reads ``${0##*/} "$@"'' and there are softlinks pointing to this file with the name of the POSIX builtins.

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[5] bourne shell on IRIX (bsh) knows about "echo -n", so one might consider it as something between SVR4.0 and SVR4.2.

[6] bourne shell on HP-UX 9/10 actually knows about multi-byte globbing and range expressions (behaviour according to the locale settings).

[7] On OSF/1 you can decide at runtime which shell you want to run, when calling /bin/sh. According to the value of the environment variable BIN_SH you get a POSIX.2 compliant shell ("xpg4"), a SVR4-like shell ("svr4") or a Bourne Shell (BIN_SH unset). On V4, i couldn't try the svr4 version (it's not installed per default). And on V5, just the posix shell is called instead.