Another sh(1) update

Peter Avalos has committed another batch of updates to sh(1), from FreeBSD.  I was going to comment on how strange it was to see software getting updated so many years later; you’d think everything there was to update for /bin/sh had been done at this point.  Digging casually, the oldest bit on sh that I can find is from 1991 – 22 years old.   The man page mentions a rewrite in 1989 based on System V Release 4 UNIX, and there were versions of sh all the way back to version 1.

Here’s a trivia question – what’s the oldest Unix utility, and what’s the oldest code still in use?  I don’t know the answer.

4 Replies to “Another sh(1) update”

  1. What’s the oldest Unix utility?

    I’m not nearly old enough to recall first-hand, and after some light Google work (and ignoring any programs that were written before the first C compiler) my best guess would be ed.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_(text_editor)

    What’s the oldest code still in use?

    bit.ly/10fDKm7

    :-P

Comments are closed.

Your post must include a link to this post.

How does this work?
Write a response on your own website and include a link to this post. Then submit your response’s URL here. Your response may appear here after moderation. To update or remove it, edit or delete your original post and submit the same URL again. Learn more about Webmentions.