shell.md

title	Unix Shell

Unix Shell

Use Warp as my terminal & Zsh as my shell. Fish & Oil seem like great shell alternatives. Pipr seems useful.

ShellCheck is great for linting scripts. How Warp works is a great read. sh is nice Go lib to parse Shell code.

rc shell from Plan 9 OS is interesting too.

fzf, Atuin & shell2http are great additions to the shell.

Variables

All active variables can be seen by running env.

• $HOME - Expands to the path of my home folder.
• $PS1 - Variable that represents my command prompt line.
• $PATH - Special environment variable that contains the command path (list of system directories that the shell searches when trying to locate a command).

Notes

• Scripts are run in subshells, and nothing is shared "upwards". That's the difference between running a script and sourcing one. A sourced (imported) script is run in your own script's namespace.
• In shell everything is a string.
• Children never touch parent environment. It can only if it runs as part of the current process (source, function, alias).
• Pipes are used to connect one process's output with another process’s input.
• /etc/paths.d define paths to add to $PATH globally to all users.

Links

• Effective Shell (Code) (HN)
• Explain Shell - Enter a command to see help text for each arg. (HN)
• Introduction to POSIX Shell
• Yoshua's notes
• Shell Auto-completion Systems
• Shell and Scripting (2019)
• ShellCheck - Finds bugs in your shell scripts. Code. (Zine)
• Rash - The Reckless Racket Shell.
• Eternal Terminal - Remote shell that automatically reconnects without interrupting the session.
• patat - Terminal-based presentations using Pandoc.
• What does your shell prompt look like? (2019)
• direnv - Unclutter your .profile. (Code) (Lobsters)
• mask - CLI task runner defined by a simple markdown file.
• Purs - Pure-inspired prompt in Rust.
• Sampler - Tool for shell commands execution, visualization and alerting. Configured with a simple YAML file.
• Nu Shell - Modern, GitHub-era shell written in Rust. (HN)
• Collection of pure POSIX sh alternatives to external processes
• Lobsters: What does your shell prompt look like? (2019)
• navi - Interactive cheatsheet tool for the command-line. (HN)
• Announcing Alacritty, a GPU-accelerated terminal emulator
• What Is a Shell? (2019)
• Lobsters: What shell do you use? (2019)
• “Use Dumb Shell, don’t Reinvent the Wheel” (2020) (Lobsters)
• In search for a better job scheduler - What if cron and systemd had a baby? Wouldn't it be beautiful? (HN)
• Writing Safe Shell Scripts (2019) (HN)
• Curl to shell isn’t so bad (2019) (HN)
• Partial Tour Through the UNIX Shell
• ABS - Programming language that works best when you're scripting on your terminal.
• Wez's Terminal - GPU-accelerated cross-platform terminal emulator and multiplexer written in Rust.
• Text processing in the shell (2020) (HN)
• Crush - Attempt to make a command line shell that is also a powerful modern programming language.
• Nsh - Fish/bash-like Posix shell in Rust. (HN)
• Three Comics For Understanding Unix Shell (2020)
• Oil Shell - New Unix shell. (Blog) (Idioms)
• asciinema - Web player for terminal session recordings. (Code) (4x smaller, 50x faster) (HN)
• svg-term-cli - Share terminal sessions via SVG and CSS.
• Customizing your shell (2020) (HN)
• tmate - Instant terminal sharing. (Code)
• Rich’s sh (POSIX shell) tricks
• Shell productivity tips and tricks (2020) (HN)
• Tutorial - Write a Shell in C (2015) (Code) (HN)
• DSL for shell scripting (2020) (Lobsters)
• Shell Script Compiler - Generic shell script compiler. Shc takes a script, which is specified on the command line and produces C source code.
• Shell script template suitable for most software developers
• Chafa - Command-line utility that converts all kinds of images, including animated GIFs, into sixel or ANSI/Unicode character output that can be displayed in a terminal.
• streamhut - Stream and send data, terminal to web and vice versa.
• TermBackTime - Terminal recording and playback.
• shell-functools - Functional programming tools for the shell.
• Hacking with environment variables (HN)
• CMD.XYZ - GPT3 command creator for Linux.
• Alacritty - Cross-platform, GPU-accelerated terminal emulator. (HN) (Lobsters)
• The Terminal Jockey's Toolbelt (2020) (Lobsters)
• asciicast2gif - Generate GIF animations from asciicasts (asciinema recordings).
• coin - Command interpreter for Unix, for learning how shells issue commands.
• Overmind - Process manager for Procfile-based applications and tmux.
• Tunshell - Remote shell into ephemeral environments behind NAT/firewall. (HN) (Web)
• A Better Shell (2019) (HN)
• What Shell Am I Using? (HN)
• terminal.sexy - Terminal Color Scheme Designer. (HN)
• Shell redirection example (2019)
• Kitty - Fast, featureful, GPU based terminal emulator. (Code) (HN) (HN)
• Upterm - Open-source solution for sharing terminal sessions instantly over the public internet via secure tunnels.
• libtmt - Small, simple, useful terminal emulation library.
• Syntactic Concepts in the Oil Language (Lobsters)
• smash - New kind of terminal. (Docs)
• webify - Turn shell commands into web services.
• waitfor - Shell app for delaying on conditions.
• Useful shell prompt (2020) (Lobsters)
• awk: BEGIN { (2020) (HN) (Lobsters)
• Pretty CSV viewing on the Command Line (2016) (Lobsters)
• Terminals Are Sexy - Curated list of Terminal frameworks, plugins & resources for CLI lovers. (Code)
• eDEX-UI - Fullscreen, cross-platform terminal emulator and system monitor that looks and feels like a sci-fi computer interface.
• What is a shell? A TTY? A Terminal?
• Features of a Modern Terminal Emulator (2020) (Lobsters)
• vte - Parser for implementing virtual terminal emulators in Rust.
• getoptions - Elegant option parser for shell scripts (sh, bash and all POSIX shells).
• McFly - Fly through your shell history.
• Hull - Shell where every piece of its state is stored in the filesystem.
• Sockets in Your Shell (2020) (HN)
• Shellac - Tool to make invoking a series of shell commands safer & better-looking.
• Become Shell Literate (2020) (HN) (Lobsters)
• Ask HN: How do I become a shell god? (2020)
• POSIX Shell and Utilities Quick Reference
• tab - Intuitive, config-driven terminal multiplexer designed for software & systems engineers.
• Waiting for jobs, and the concept of the shell (2020)
• Terminal Recorder - Fast terminal recorder that generates animated gif images for the web written in rust.
• Unix shell pipelines have two usage patterns (2021) (Lobsters)
• atom - Shell scripting that will knock your socks off.
• sh - Shell parser, formatter, and interpreter with bash support; includes shfmt.
• Compleat - Generate command-line completions using a simple DSL.
• The terminal, the console and the shell - what are they? (2021)
• tio - Simple TTY terminal I/O application. (Web)
• rwsh - UNIX shell based around Structural Regular Expressions and the usam experiment.
• Why Create a New Unix Shell? (2021) (HN)
• Next Generation Shell (NGS) - Modern programming language with the focus on systems engineering. (Web)
• Alternative Shells (Lobsters)
• Run Python Code in a Shell Script (2021)
• murex - Alternative shell with native support for JSON, YAML, TOML, CSV, etc. (Web) (HN)
• Atuin - Manages and synchronizes your shell history.
• pimp - Give your shell commands superpowers.
• Fig - Autocomplete for terminals on MacOS. (Web) (HN) (Issues)
• Elvish Shell - Expressive programming language and a versatile interactive shell, combined into one seamless package. (Tour)
• All the characters that work on any terminal and any operating system
• Improving shell workflows with fzf (2021) (HN)
• Shell Field Guide
• Koi language - Minimalistic language, mainly aimed at shell scripting. (Code)
• What was the point of [ “x$var” = “xval” ]? (2021) (HN)
• The TTY demystified (2008) (HN)
• Reverse Shell Generator (Code)
• Learn GNU AWK
• My Favorite One Liners (HN)
• The Once and Future Shell (2021)
• zx - JavaScript for Shell Scripting. (Lobsters) (HN) (Video) (Lobsters) (Intro to Writing Scripts With zx)
• lazycli - Turn static CLI commands into TUIs with ease.
• Quickly copy the output of the last shell command you ran (2021)
• Performance optimizations for the shell prompt (2021)
• GoTTY - Share your terminal as a web application.
• TermPair - View and control terminals from your browser with end-to-end encryption.
• Unix Shell Programming: The Next 50 Years (2021) (HN) (HN) (Review) (HN)
• Hilbish - Interactive Unix-like shell written in Go, with the config and other code written in Lua.
• Typed Pipes in Every Shell (HN)
• 4 Useful fzf Tricks for Your Terminal (2021)
• How to replace a string with sed in current and recursive subdirectories
• Gufo - Modern shell language.
• Warp - Fast, Rust-based terminal. (HN) (Issues) (HN)
• How Warp Works (2021) (Lobsters)
• TStream - Live streaming from your terminal. (Web)
• ; echo "Shell Injection" (2021) (Lobsters) (HN)
• Unix Shell: History and Trivia (2021)
• Processing Semi-Structured Data in the Unix Shell (2021)
• An Opinionated Guide to xargs (2021) (HN)
• Illustrated Redirection Tutorial (HN)
• Running Awk in parallel to process 256M records (2020)
• PaSh: Light-touch Data-Parallel Shell Processing (2021)
• resholve - Replaces references to a bash/shell script's external dependencies (commands and sourced scripts) with absolute paths.
• Fun with Redirection (2021)
• Dune - Shell by the beach. (HN)
• Understanding AWK (2021) (HN) (Lobsters)
• Cloudshell - Xterm.js frontend that connects to a Go backend to provide a shell to the host system. Basically, access your shell from a browser.
• The Return of the Unix Shell (2021)
• Command line text processing with GNU Coreutils
• Showing GUIs from Shell Scripts (2021) (HN)
• overdub - Create new commands from your shell history or terminal.
• async - Tool to parallelize shell commands.
• Seashells - Pipe output from command-line programs to the web in real-time. (HN) (Go Client)
• Run - Easily manage and invoke small scripts and wrappers.
• Stephen Bourne: Early days of Unix and design of sh (2015)
• Anatomy of a Terminal Emulator (2021) (HN)
• GNU Utility: envsubst
• shell.how - Write down a command-line to see how it works. (Code)
• Useful sed scripts & patterns (HN)
• nhi - Capture every information about each executed command. (HN)
• Demo Magic - Handy shell script that enables you to write repeatable demos in a bash environment.
• Tiny Shell (tish) - Written in Go.
• terminal-to-html - Converts arbitrary shell output (with ANSI) into beautifully rendered HTML. (Web)
• xonsh - Python-powered, cross-platform, Unix-gazing shell language and command prompt. (Web)
• Common shell script mistakes (2008) (HN)
• makesure - Simple task/command runner with declarative goals and dependencies.
• vsh - Unix shell written and implemented in rust.
• You shouldn't parse the output of ls(1) (HN)
• Oil Retrospective: Software Architecture
• Passing runtime data to AWK (2020)
• The Way - Code snippets manager for your terminal.
• Practical Shell Patterns I Actually Use (2022) (HN)
• The missing comprehensive package manager for Shell (2022) (Lobsters)
• rat - Compose shell commands to build terminal applications.
• chmod-cli - Effortlessly generate chmod commands.
• Morbig: A Static parser for POSIX shell (2020) (Lobsters)
• mrsh - Minimal POSIX shell.
• Anatomy of a Terminal Emulator (2021) (Code)
• How to Split a String in POSIX Shell (2021)
• Blink Shell - Professional, desktop grade terminal for iOS. With Mosh & SSH clients for iOS, lightning fast and fully customizable. (Docs)
• Julia Evans's Shell Examples
• termsvg - CLI tool to record, share and export your terminal as a animated SVG image.
• Bearings - Fast, clean, customizable shell prompt for zsh, bash, fish, and more.
• Oh My Posh - Prompt theme engine for any shell. (Web)
• Please stop writing shell scripts (2022) (Lobsters)
• GitHub Scripts To Rule Them All - Boilerplate scripts describing the normalized script pattern that GitHub uses in its projects.
• Cotowali - Statically typed scripting language that transpile into POSIX sh. (HN)
• Morbig - Static Parser for POSIX Shell. (HN)
• Awesome Terminals
• Cli2Cloud - Pipe your terminal output to the cloud. (Web)
• What are the most useful aliases in your bashrc or zshrc (2022)
• sd - Cozy nest for your scripts. (Article) (HN)
• svg-term - Share terminal sessions via SVG and CSS.
• Redo - Command line application to easily create reusable functions in your own shell. (HN)
• The Day of a new Command-Line Interface: Shell (2022)
• Crab - Simple unix toolkit for working with local development environments.
• Nice scripting languages
• Pipr - Tool to interactively write shell pipelines.
• Terminal Colors - Color standards for terminal emulators.
• asciinema virtual terminal
• asciinema-rs - Asciinema client written in Rust.
• Build Your Own Shell
• ACME Shell script: acme.sh - Pure Unix shell script implementing ACME client protocol.
• The Front-End Developer's Guide to the Terminal (2022) (HN)
• Textualize - Framework for building Text User Interface applications. (HN) (Web Code)
• An Introduction to the Unix Shell
• Hush - Unix shell scripting language inspired by Lua. (Docs) (Lobsters) (HN)
• webhookd - Simple webhook server launching shell scripts.
• Extraterm - Swiss army chainsaw of terminal emulators.
• Ask HN: Why are there so many companies trying to reinvent the terminal (badly)? (2022)
• gifcast - Converts an asciinema cast to an animated GIF.
• RESH: Rich Enhanced Shell History - Contextual shell history for Zsh and Bash. (HN)
• Everything you ever wanted to know about terminals (but were afraid to ask) (HN)
• GameShell - Game to learn (or teach) how to use standard commands in a Unix shell. (HN)
• Shell Patterns for Easy Automated Code Migrations (HN)
• Shell scripts should be written to be clear first
• Writing Unit-Tests and Mocks for UNIX Shells (2022)
• asciinema-edit - Auxiliary tools for dealing with ASCIINEMA casts.
• PaSh - Light-touch Data-Parallel Shell Processing. (Web)
• Start all of your commands with a comma
• Practically Correct, Just-in-Time Shell Script Parallelization
• A lifehack for your shell (2022) (Lobsters)
• What happens when you press a key in your terminal? (2022) (HN) (Lobsters)
• z-run - Scripting library lightweight Go-based tool. (Lobsters)
• shellfirm - Intercept any risky patterns (default or defined by you) and prompt you a small challenge for double verification.
• What is TTY? (2022)
• agg - asciinema GIF generator.
• YavaScript - Bash-like script runner which is distributed as a single statically-linked binary. Scripts are written in JavaScript.
• Lunatic.chat - Telnet chat server written in Rust, running on Lunatic.
• Transcending Posix: The End of an Era? (2022) (HN)
• Es - Shell with higher-order functions.
• Ask HN: Is it still possible to live in a terminal? (2022)
• Whipping up a new Shell – Lash#Cat9 (2022) (Lobsters)
• Cat9 - command-line shell written in Lua. (HN)
• Shell Script Best Practices, from a decade of scripting things (2022) (HN) (Lobsters)
• Keyboard Shortcuts every Command Line Hacker should know about GNU Readline (HN)
• Toy Shell
• hiSHtory - Your shell history in context, synced, and queryable. (HN)
• Building a simple shell in C (2022)
• Codex CLI - Natural Language Command Line Interface.
• Why is the terminal input so weird? | Warp (2022) (HN)
• We Built Syntax Highlighting for the Terminal Input Editor (2022) (HN)
• tesh - TEstable SHell sessions in Markdown. (Lobsters)
• A pragmatic approach to shell completion (2022)
• Drag and Drop from Terminal (2022) (HN)
• shcopy - Shell Copy. Simple utility that copies text to the clipboard from anywhere using ANSI OSC52 sequence.
• patsh - Command-line tool for patching shell scripts inspired by resholve.