rc

It depends on what you are looking for. My recommendation for learning "how is X done in a shell" is the OpenBSD ksh: https://github.com/ibara/oksh It's what they use for /bin/sh, it has everything that a complete shell needs (including a mechanism for providing command completions) and has code that is much easier to read than bash or zsh. Something that I also would recommend is the design document for the plan9 rc shell; it is a worthwhile read for anybody interested in shells: https://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/rc An implementation is also available if one wants to look at how it could be done: https://github.com/rakitzis/rc

I just use rc shell from Plan9 (ported to Linux[1]) nowadays, it is more simple than bash and whatever other shell there is out there. You want functions? For loops? Lists? They got them. [1] https://github.com/rakitzis/rc

The rc shell [2] from plan9 seems more simpler (and saner) than bash. At least you can read the mapage of it[1]. [1] https://www.mankier.com/1/rc [2] https://github.com/rakitzis/rc

rc shell is still maintained for Plan9 (in both 9legacy and 9front) and for UNIX in plan9port. I have used it has my daily shell for almost a decade now. There are also native UNIX ports available, usually based on https://github.com/rakitzis/rc. I enjoy the simple syntax and I wouldn't call it dormant by any means. It kept simple on purpose and doesn't require many changes.

Byron's rc. https://github.com/rakitzis/rc Sane quoting eliminates and a lack of recursive expansion make ssh a breeze. Pattern matching, backquote status, and pipe status simplification are all incredibly easy to get right. C-like syntax for blocks means nested hierarchies are easy to understand and to write correctly. Simple small binary, doesn't require readline and can be built for almost every architecture and OS.

Program in rc shell[0]. It has a much superior syntax, and can manage piped commands. The use of the single quote to mean "really fucking quote", and $* working as every user would expect.. makes it a joy. [0]: https://github.com/rakitzis/rc Secondly, I use rc in emacs shell-mode which poorly emulates a terminal, so advanced completion and all that other stuff I delegate to emacs. rc is just a programming language that supports shell commands extremely well.

I used a port of the rc shell for linux as my login shell for a couple of months. I switched back to zsh eventually because rc doesn't have job control and autocompletion. The autocompletion wasn't that big an issue because it can use readline for history completion, and it can be configured so that when you type the start of a command and hit up arrow it will find the last command that started with what you typed. This can be replicated for zsh and bash, and it's arguably as good as autocompletion. I found no convinient work-around for the lack of job control, other than starting a new terminal. How is rc better than bash or zsh? I've read the bash man pages and I couldn't figure out exactly how bash expands commands before executing them. Every time the shell see's an unquoted variable name (e.g. $foo) it will do word splitting, which

Use rc instead. My life has gotten so much better since I gave up on other shells. http://tobold.org/article/rc http://github.com/rakitzis/rc

https://github.com/rakitzis/rc is the official location of byron's rc, and is now actively maintained by Toby Goodwin. Please don't reinvent the wheel - rc compiles down to a correct nice little binary without a bug I've run into in the while I've been running it (since I've worked with byron). And busybox is nothing to hold up, what it lacks in disk usage it also lacks in correctness.