Early history of Bash (was: Re: Default PATH setting - reduce to something more sensible?)

On 2025-01-26, Keith Thompson <Keith.S.Thompson+u@gmail.com> wrote:

This is obviously deliberate, and I see similar code (without the
posixly_correct condition) in bash 1.05 from 1990.
>
According to Wikipedia, POSIX began in 1988, and the initial
release of bash was in 1989, just a year later.  Obviously the
authors thought that expanding literal '~'s in $PATH was a good
idea at the time, and it's not suprising that they didn't pay much
attention to POSIX.  It would have been nice if they'd documented it.

In recent years, I've been wondering about the early history of
Bash, but cursory searches came up empty.  Versions before 1.14
have even been expunged from ftp.gnu.org.

My vague impression is that Bash started as an attempt to combine
csh and sh, but it's not clear to me how soon people noticed the
infeasibility and pivoted to a sh-based model.  Or maybe that's not
at all how it happened.

If anybody has pointers to the early history or old source code,
I'd love to know.

--
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber                          naddy@mips.inka.de