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History of Bash

• Previously, most of the software in the UNIX world was proprietary and closed source. UNIX system was also not open-sourced for which, you had to use a shell. There was a shell existed at that time named by “Bourne Shell” under the /bin/sh command which was proprietary and closed source. Bourne named after its inventor- Steven Bourne.
• Richard Stallman at that time began GNU project with Free Software Foundation (FSF) to create a UNIX-compatible operating system aiming everything as open-source. There was a lack of progress in the revolution. He needed a free shell that could run existing shell scripts. It was imperative to a completely open-source system built as one of the few projects he funded with FSF. Then on January 110, 1988, Brian Fox (FSF employee) began coding on Bash and released Bash as beta, version 0.99 on June 8, 1989.
• Brian Fox remained in FSF as the primary Bash maintainer till 1993. Then he laid off from FSF, and Chet Ramey (earlier contributor in FSF) got his responsibility.
• Further, on December 23, 1996, Chet Ramey released another bash version 2.0 for the public with a range of new features over the old bash version.
• And now Chet Ramey is known for the official bash maintainer, and he continues to make further enhancements in bash.

Bash is the standard shell included with Linux. It is the most popular shell known today of being open-source and also with various productive features we read in the further topic. It is available for Linux distributions, macOS, Solaris 11, and Windows 10 too. It is offering the best experience for its users with a lot of improvements.

Note: Currently, we have the latest bash version, i.e., bash-5.0 with new features.

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