that's quite interesting, for me at least. If you have any good link to
articles or books about the history of shell programs and the motivations
behind various choices and want to share I would really appreciate it
idk if this is interesting to the list also or I should message privately
about topics not directly related to zsh, or if I should start a new
thread, I would appreciate some direction on this

Pier Paolo Grassi


Il giorno mer 3 mar 2021 alle ore 11:23 Stephane Chazelas <
stephane@chazelas.org> ha scritto:

> 2021-03-03 08:57:15 +0100, Pier Paolo Grassi:
> > out of curiosity, how have you assembled this informations? from memory
> or
> > digging in the source trees?
> [...]
>
> I do collect a number of old archives of various shell source
> codes downloaded from here and there and look in there for this
> kind of information. I enjoy this kind of archeological digging.
>
> For recent versions, you can generally look in cvs/svn/git logs,
> or use git blame/svn ann or git log --grep...
>
> For older versions, most shells keep changelogs. zsh has some
> Etc/ChangeLog*, bash has a NEWS and CWRU/changelog. zsh links
> its changelog to the mailing list. So not only you can find the
> change, but also the reasoning and discussions behind it. That's
> quite unique and invaluable.
>
> It's hard to obtain old ksh versions. All I have is ksh86 (from
> some bsd source tree), svr4.2 ksh88d from archive.org, the
> leaked solaris11's ksh88i, ksh93d from dtksh, ksh85's man page
> and some of ksh93's since it's been made opensource. There's a
> RELEASE file in there (and more for the libraries) but it's a
> bit patchy.
>
> BSD shells (based on ash originally published on usenet in 1989,
> so easy to find, except for OpenBSD which switched to pdksh) are
> easy as the sccs history is publicly available.
>
> For tcsh, someone compiled all versions back to 6.06.1 in the
> git repo. Some older versions can be found on usenet.
>
> I started using zsh around the time bash 2.0 came out. But that
> was 25 years ago. I can't say I remember much from then. Back
> then, bash was already quite limited compared to zsh. It didn't
> even have arrays.
>
> --
> Stephane
>