Almquist shell
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The Almquist shell (ash) is Kenneth Almquist's clone of the Bourne shell. It is a fast, small, POSIX-compatible Unix shell. Ash is useful for running shell scripts, but it does not feature job control or other features that other interactive shells such as bash and ksh offer.
The following is extracted from the Slackware package information:
ash (Kenneth Almquist's ash shell)
A lightweight (92K) Bourne compatible shell. Great for machines with low memory, but does not provide all the extras of shells like bash, tcsh, and zsh. Runs most shell scripts compatible with the Bourne shell. Note that under Linux, most scripts seem to use at least some bash-specific syntax. The Slackware setup scripts are a notable exception, since ash is the shell used on the install disks. NetBSD uses ash as its /bin/sh.