V6 Thompson Shell Port provides two ports of the original /bin/sh from Sixth Edition (V6) UNIX (circa 1975).

Osh is an enhanced, backward-compatible port of the Sixth Edition Thompson shell.  This project also includes sh6 (an unenhanced port of the shell) and glob6 (a port of its global command).

Together, sh6 and glob6 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.

The original Thompson shell was principally written by Ken Thompson of Bell Labs.

Additionally, this project includes the following shell utilities:

* if   - conditional command (ported from Sixth Edition UNIX)
* goto - transfer command (ported from Sixth Edition UNIX)
* fd2  - redirect from/to file descriptor 2

The looptest utility is packaged separately. It provides a simple way to script count-controlled shell loops.

The osh project also has a Gophersite.

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

What's New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]

· This release incorporates changes from osh-20091127-p1.patch to fix a file offset and lseek(2) problem with the external goto command on OpenSolaris. This problem resulted in unexpected goto behavior for sh6 scripts. This release also makes installation of package documentation and examples optional instead of default install behavior. Lastly, this release changes the example rc init files so that users can use osh to initialize/invoke sh6 by doing "[exec] osh [-i | -l] sh6". This can make it easier for users to use sh6 interactively if they've never done so before.