The
Almquist shell (also known as
A Shell,
ash and
sh) is a lightweight
Unix shell originally written by Kenneth Almquist in the late 1980s. Initially a clone of the
System V.4 variant of the
Bourne shell, it replaced the original Bourne shell in the
BSD versions of Unix released in the early 1990s. Derivative versions of ash are still installed as the default shell (
/bin/sh) on
FreeBSD,
NetBSD,
DragonFly BSD,
MINIX, and
Android, and in some
Linux distributions.