[dev] s - suckless shell

From: <rain1_AT_openmailbox.org>
Date: Fri, 12 Aug 2016 22:41:16 +0100

Hello!

GNU Bash is 138227 lines of code. I wrote a simpler shell* in 800 lines:
https://notabug.org/rain1/s/

*It is not a true POSIX shell. You can't run existing scripts with it.
It's technically just a command interpreter.

With that out the way here's an overview of how it works:

Tokenization [tokenizer.c]: Instead of the strange and complex way that
normal shells work (where "$X" is different to $X for example) s works
by a strict tokenize -> variable expansion -> parse -> execute pipeline.
This makes it much easier to program with and less likely for scripts to
break simply because your CWD has a space in it.

Variable expansion [variables.c]: The expander supports both $FOO and
${FOO} syntax, it just resolves environment variables.

Parsing [parser.c]: There are just 3 binary operations |, && and || and
'&' optional at the end of a line. There is no "if" or looping or
anything. parser.c is 85 lines of code and uses my region [region.c]
based allocator to simplify teardown of the structure when it needs to
be free'd.

[interpreter.c] The interpreter is a simple recursive process that walks
the AST, creating pipes and forking off children.

[supporting/*.c] Instead of redirection operators like <, > and >> being
part of the language they are simply provided as supporting programs
that should be added to the $PATH: < is basically just cat. The
redirection operators are all packaged together in busybox style.
Similarly glob is not part of the language, it is a 20 line script
instead. You use it like this: glob rm *py

[builtins.c] Of course a shell cannot do everything by external tools -
so the builtins cd, source, set, unset are provided (and treated
specially by the interpreter).

It can run scripts you supply, shebang works, using it in a terminal
interactively works. In theory enough for practical every day use.

Except for the low linecount (it is even smaller than execline) and
simplicity of the lexical aspect of the shell language it does not have
strong benefits over existing shells (especially since it is not POSIX
compatible) but I hope that the code may be interesting or refreshing to
others who are unhappy with the excess of bloat most software has.
Received on Fri Aug 12 2016 - 23:41:16 CEST

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