I imagined the shell was first written to manage and start the other commands of the system. But it seems that it was first for some kind of interactive use:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_shell#Early_shells
http://www.multicians.org/shell.html

But even if it was not, the shell can still be considered as a monolithic C program made to boot the system by running external commands, configurable enough to cover all use cases user may encounter. It rely on external commands, and compose them.

From this point of view it looks that systemd is replacing the shell, by calling external commands (with a 'd' at the end, like "journald") and composing them to make an init system.

Is this really the shortcomings of popular shells that gave a rise to systemd?

(03-11-2016, 01:45 PM)TheAnachron Wrote: near-second kernel

Oh, overlapping with kernel features too, some sort of kernel-level shell, then?