From: "John Levine"
I had heard that called the Mashey shell, also
according to Wikipedia
the PWB shell.
Wikipedia content is a little better than LLM output, but not much! (The best
thing in Wikipedia is the referencs.)
The changes to the Thompson shell to make the PWB shell (which I guess Massey
worked on; hence the name) are laid out pretty well in "UNIX Time-Sharing
System: The Programmer's Workbench" (of which Massey is a co-author):
https://archive.org/details/bstj57-6-2177
The projects which used PWB made extensive use of shell command files. So,
PWB made two kinds of changes to the shell: i) flow-of-control commands used
in shell procedures were made built-ins (which gave a huge decrease in fork()
overhead), and ii) minor enhancements to shell command semantics (variables,
evaluation of expressions, nestable control structure), which made shell
command files much more powerful (and thus used a lot more).
Minnie's 'version comparison tool' is useful to use to compare the
'Massey'
shell:
https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=PWB1/sys/source/s2/sh.c
with the vanilla V6 ('Thompson') shell. The PWB shell is definitely a tweaked
version of the Thompson shell.
Noel