Available shells

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The following are the shells that are provided with AIX®.

  • Korn shell (started with the ksh command)
  • Bourne shell (started with the bsh command)
  • Restricted shell (a limited version of the Bourne shell, and started with the Rsh command)
  • POSIX shell (also known as the Korn Shell, and started with the psh command)
  • Restricted shell for the Korn shell (ksh and ksh93). The ksh and ksh93 shells are provided with their restricted shell equivalents rksh and rksh93.
  • Default shell (started with the sh command)
  • C shell (started with the csh command)
  • Trusted shell (a limited version of the Korn shell, and started with the tsh command)
  • Remote shell (started with the rsh command)

The login shell refers to the shell that is loaded when you log in to the computer system. Your login shell is set in the /etc/passwd file. The Korn shell is the standard operating system login shell and is backward-compatible with the Bourne Shell.

The Korn shell (/usr/bin/ksh) is set up as the default shell. The default or standard shell refers to the shells linked to and started with the /usr/bin/sh command. The Bourne shell (/usr/bin/sh) can be substituted as the default shell. The POSIX shell, which is invoked by the /usr/bin/psh command, resides as a link to the /usr/bin/sh command.