X-Nico

3 unusual facts about Unix shell


Unix shell

The Bourne shell, sh, was written by Stephen Bourne at AT&T as the original Unix command line interpreter; it introduced the basic features common to all the Unix shells, including piping, here documents, command substitution, variables, control structures for condition-testing and looping and filename wildcarding.

Variable interpolation

Languages that support variable interpolation include Perl, PHP, Ruby, Tcl, Groovy, and most Unix shells.

Vertical bar

In most Unix shells (command interpreters), this is represented by the vertical bar character.


Surfraw

According to its creator Julian Assange: "Surfraw provides a fast unix command line interface to a variety of popular WWW search engines and other artifacts of power. It reclaims google, altavista, dejanews, freshmeat, research index, slashdot, and many others from the false-prophet, pox-infested heathen lands of html forms, placing these wonders where they belong; deep in unix heartland, as god-loving extensions to the shell."


see also

KSH

Korn shell, a Unix shell developed by David Korn in the early 1980s