Bash is a free software Unix shell written for the GNU Project. Its name is an acronym which stands for Bourne-again shell. The name is a pun on the name of the Bourne shell (sh), an early and important Unix shell written by Stephen Bourne and distributed with Version 7 Unix circa 1978, and "born again".

Bash was created in 1987 by Brian Fox. In 1990 Chet Ramey became the primary maintainer. Bash is the default shell on most systems built on top of the Linux kernel as well as on Mac OS X and Darwin, and it can be run on most Unix-like operating systems.

It has also been ported to Microsoft Windows using Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications (SUA), or POSIX emulation provided by Cygwin and MSYS. It has been ported to MS-DOS by the DJGPP project and to Novell NetWare. The Bash command syntax is a superset of the Bourne shell command syntax.

The vast majority of Bourne shell scripts can be executed by Bash without modification, with the exception of Bourne shell scripts referencing a Bourne special variable or those using builtin Bourne commands. Bash command syntax includes ideas drawn from the Korn shell (ksh) and the C shell (csh) such as command line editing, command history, the directory stack, the $RANDOM and $PPID variables, and POSIX command substitution syntax $(…). When used as an interactive command shell and pressing the tab key, Bash automatically uses command line completion to match partly typed program names, filenames and variable names.

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