Project

The osh project is hereby dedicated to the individuals at Bell Labs who started the UNIX ball rolling in 1969.

The objective of the osh project is to honor our shared computing history by maintaining two different ports of the original sh(1) as it appeared in Sixth Edition (V6) UNIX. One of the ports, osh, contains enhancements to make it usable as an interactive login shell while also remaining backward compatible. The other port, sh6, simply provides a backward-compatible user interface without any obvious enhancements. In addition, the shell utilities necessary for globbing and flow control in shell scripts (aka command files) are also included.

The osh project should build successfully on any POSIX-compliant UNIX system. It builds successfully on DragonFly BSD, FreeBSD, Mac OS X, NetBSD, OpenBSD, OpenSolaris, and a variety of GNU/Linux systems at the time of the latest release.

Developer

I, Jeffrey Allen Neitzel, have been the principal developer and maintainer of the osh project since July 2003. Also, see the AUTHORS file for further information about the origins of this software.

I have been using some type of UNIX-like system for my daily computing needs since at least 1999, always using open-source systems whenever possible. Granted, I have used Mac OS X as my main system since 2005 even though it is not completely open source. Thus, I do virtually all of my coding on a combination of OpenBSD, NetBSD, Mac OS X, and GNU/Linux for this and a variety of other reasons.

For anyone who may be curious, I am a member of humanity who lives on a little planet called Earth. See my home page at and/or my blog at http://blog.v6shell.org/ for further information about this particular Earthling (and what I do & think about when not working on osh) if you like.

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank SDF (where this website is hosted), and its benevolent caretaker, for the fabulous computing facilities and learning opportunities which are available here. I also wish to thank the members of the SDF community for helping to make this such an interesting place.

In addition, I wish to thank Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson, Gunnar Ritter, and the individuals at The UNIX Heritage Society (TUHS), without whose previous work, the osh project would not exist.

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