FreeBSD sh(1) built for macOS.

A Bourne-lineage shell with faithful echo — no escape interpretation by default, honoring the original contract.

macOS ships zsh as the default shell. zsh's builtin echo interprets escape sequences (\n, \t, etc.) by default. The standalone /bin/echo is faithful, but the shell builtin is not. This means echo "$var" produces different output depending on whether the shell or the binary handles it.

FreeBSD sh does not have this problem. Its echo builtin reproduces input faithfully. Escape interpretation is opt-in via -e, not the default.

brew install libedit
make
make install

Requires Xcode Command Line Tools and Homebrew libedit. Default install prefix is ~/bin.

$ fsh -c 'echo "hello\nworld"'
hello\nworld

Compare with zsh:

$ zsh -c 'echo "hello\nworld"'
hello
world

Shell source from FreeBSD main (February 2023 snapshot), directory layout follows upstream. A small compat.h provides Darwin shims. Linked against Homebrew libedit for line editing, history, and tab completion.

BSD-2-Clause. See COPYRIGHT.