ash was first released via a posting to the
Usenet news group, approved and moderated by
Rich Salz on 30 May 1989. It was described as "a reimplementation of the System V shell [with] most features of that shell, plus some additions". Fast, small, and virtually compatible with the
POSIX standard's specification of the Unix shell, ash did not provide
line editing or
command history mechanisms, because Almquist felt that such functionality should be moved into the
terminal driver. However, modern variants support it. The following is extracted from the ash package information from
Slackware v14: with FreeBSD sh Myriad forks have been produced from the original ash release. These derivatives of ash are installed as the default shell (/bin/sh) on
FreeBSD,
NetBSD,
DragonFly BSD,
MINIX, and in some
Linux distributions. MINIX 3.2 used the original ash version, whose
test feature differed from POSIX. That version of the shell was replaced in MINIX 3.3. Android used ash until
Android 4.0, at which point it switched to
mksh.{{cite web ==Dash ==