Gregor Purdy - The Perl Shell (psh)

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The Perl Shell is a shell that combines the interactive nature of a Unix shell with the power of Perl. The goal is to eventually have a full featured shell that behaves as expected for normal shell activity. But, the Perl Shell will use Perl syntax and functionality for control-flow statements and other things.

Mailing Lists

There are Perl Shell Announcements and Perl Shell Develpment mailing lists. These are now hosted by SourceForge. To be added, see the SourceForge web site.

Anonymous CVS

SourceForge also has anonymous CVS access available if you want to track the bleeding edge of psh development.

1.8.1 [2007-07-20]

1.8 [2003-01-18]

1.7 [2003-01-16]

1.1 [2003-01-16]

1.0 [2003-01-02]

0.009 [2001-01-05]

0.008 [2000-04-30]

0.007 [2000-02-14]

0.006 [2000-01-03]

Summary of Changes

Important features: "Manifest Filters" make simple filter writing easier; the Win32 port has been fixed and enhanced;Recursive globbing similar to zsh.

Refinements to the 0.005 code: A new delenv builtin is provided, and kill now takes multiple process IDs. Some more work has been done on I18N.

Change Log

New Features:

New builtin delenv.
Builtin kill accepts multiple PIDs.
Saving the history file now respects $Psh::history_size if Term::ReadLine::Perl is used.

Manifest Filters for pipeline code, e.g. try:

    ls | s/y/k/                      # Substitution. Example is a Y2K fix.
    ls | { print ++$i, ": $_"; }q    # Quick. Iterate over lines.
    netstat | { $_[1]>2; }g          # Grepish. Print line if { ... } evaluates to true.

See the psh documentation for more information.

New recursive globbing using **/ (Example: grep anything **/*.pm).

Win32 Port Enhancements:

It now works. 0.005 was missing a couple of patches.
Makes use of system registry.
Implementations of execute_complex_command(), get_hostname(), get_all_users(), get_home_dir(), and get_known_hosts().

Internals:

Moved prompt code and perl evaluation code into own packages.
Implementing redirects and pipes in psh.
Clean-ups for all code using filenames (now using File::Spec).
More I18N.
Removed usage of $ENV{HOME} in portable code.

Version 0.005 (1999-12-28)

A very functional release.

New Evaluation Strategies

brace
fallback_builtin

Builtins of this type (currently searched in package Psh::Builtins::Fallback) will be executed AFTER no program of that name was found. This allows simulation of common commands like ls and env on systems not having such binaries.
auto_resume

New Bultins

builtin
env

On systems with an env binary installed it will use the binary, on other systems (namely Win32) it will print a list of environment variables.
help
unalias

Builtin Enhancements

alias

Changed builtin alias so that 'alias name' displays the alias definition for that name.
bg

It's now possible to do 'bg commandname' (e.g. 'bg emacs') fg has the same behaviour for consistency.
cd

Respects CDPATH now and sets OLDPWD.

Portability Enhancements

Added portability infrastructure.
Working Win32 port (though it has limited features).

Completion Enhancements

Variables for bookmark completion are now @Psh::Completion::bookmarks and @Psh::Completion::netprograms.
New Perl Hashkey completion will TAB complete the name of keys for Perl hashes (if they are not written in quotes).
Support for user defined completions by %Psh::Completion::custom_completions.
Perl Symbol completion now supports package names and package name completion.
Support for TAB completions for builtins.
A custom_completions entry may now also be code. If the value of a custom_completions key/value pair is a sub that sub will be called and the result used as rules.
A rule for custom_completions may now have an optional third argument. If that argument is true, the custom_completion will replace the standard completions instead of adding to them.
Filename Completion respects the FIGNORE environment variable now.

Other Changes

Documentation updates.
Locales defined for: Default (English), French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish.
New fallback builtins: ls.
Prompt evaluation is now more bash compatible and handles even more complex prompts.
Replaced Psh::OS::Unix::glob() - now uses its own glob routine instead of CORE::glob() - and is significantly faster (important for executable completion).
New variables: $Psh::Prompt_cont, $Psh::result_array.
Moved almost all code from psh into Psh, Psh::Builtins and Psh::Util.
Environment variable CURRENT_SHELL is set to the path to psh.

Bug Fixes

Generation of weekday names.
Small fixes for setenv, print_list and abs_path.
Fixed signal description generation.

Version 0.004 (1999-12-13)

This version of the Perl Shell adds significant functionality. However, it is still a development release.

Thanks to the Perl Core team (in alphabetical order): Simon Huggins, Markus Peter, Omer Shenker and Glen Whitney for their excellent work leading up to this release.

Changes for this version:
- Bug fixes.
- Refactoring of code into script + modules.
- Background process management much more like bash.
- Perl code in addition to executables may be put in the background.
- Pipelines.
- Initial internationalization.
- New built-ins: 'alias', 'export', 'setenv'.
- A flexible set of evaluation strategies that can be selected or reordered by setting a configuration variable.
- Prompt strings can have escapes like \07 (ASCII BEL) or \10 (ASCII LF).
- avoided trying to save history if there wasn't even a ReadLine module
- added $psh::debugging variable to hold the debugging state, so it can be turned on and off in a running psh
- A $psh::echo variable to control whether perl results of evaluation are printed.
- The which builtin now shows which strategy will apply to a given command line
- Grab more input automatically if <<BLOCK appears anywhere on the line, or if the line ends with an open brace.
- results of psh::which searches are hashed.
- Thorough documentation of every user-accessible variable and function
Documentation
Download

Version 0.004pre2 (1999-12-05)

A developer-only release leading up to 0.004

Version 0.004pre1 (1999-12-04)

A developer-only release leading up to 0.004

Version 0.003-gw2

Patches to 0.003 from Glen Whitney

Version 0.003-gw1

Patches to 0.003 from Glen Whitney

Version 0.003 (1999-11-23)

This version of the Perl Shell adds significant functionality. However, it is still an early development release.

Extra special thanks to Markus Peter for his contributions to this release. Much of the new functionality is due to his efforts.

Changes for this version:
- Rudimentary background jobs handling and job management.
- Signal handling.
- Filename completion.
- Updates to history handling.
- Flexible %built_ins mechanism for adding built-in functions.
- Smart mode is on by default.
Documentation
Download

Version 0.002 Patch 5 (1999-11-08)

Changes for this version:
- Changed prompting to pass prompt string into iget(), which passes it on to Term::ReadLine::readline or prints it out if the ReadLine module is not available. Thanks to Sam Tregar and tmb at lumo.com.
- Changed history handling so that empty lines and those consisting of entirely whitespace are not recorded.
- Fixed a couple of typos.
- Changed the regular expression for "smart mode" to allow "vi +3 psh" in addition to "ls -l".
- Now uses Getopt::Std for option processing.
- Fixed the code that detects the presence of Term::ReadLine.
- Made more use of debug mode to print out advisory information.
- Use zero instead of undef to set Term::ReadLine::MinLine so that we don't get undef usage trouble in the guts of Term::ReadLine::Gnu.
Documentation
Download

Version 0.002 Patch 4 (1999-11-01)

This patch added support for custom prompt variables, built-in functions cd, exit, and which, and a few other minor enhancements.

Version 0.002 Patch 3

Version 0.002 Patch 2 (1999-08-23)

This patch fixes a problem with the prior patch, where `ls' was no longer treated correctly by smart mode, even though `ls -l' was. (Thanks to Jamie Kucab for catching this one).

Version 0.002 Patch 1 (1999-08-23)

This patch fixes a problem with smart mode, which prevented simple commands like ``$x=1'' from doing the right thing. (Thanks to Jamie Kucab for catching this one).

Version 0.002 (1999-07-23)

Version 0.001 (1999-07-23)

: 2007-07-20 22:02:30 -0700 (Fri, 20 Jul 2007) $