About the memory management in the Bourne shell ( via ) is a collection of discussions about the original Bourne shell's creative, interesting, and infamous approach to memory management in the original Unix memory allocation scheme . If you like this kind of thing, it's worth reading through and decoding things.

(It also links to a recording of Stephen Bourne's BSDCan 2015 talk "Early days of Unix and design of sh" , which I haven't watched yet but keep seeing links to. Someday.)