mshell is my personal scripting language, meant to replace short shell scripts (< ~100 LOC) and other shell one-liners. A concatenative language is a good fit for this purpose, as it allows for easy composition of simple functions and pipelines.

The goal is to provide most of the simple Gnu utilities as part of the language, while making calls to external programs and pipelines simple and easy.

Future goals are to even add some type safety.

The beginnings of some documentation are for now located here.

mshell is compiled to a single executable binary, so installation is straightforward. First, download the executable from the GitHub releases page. The assets are tar.gz files, so you would unpack them with:

tar -xvf linux_amd64.tar.gz

Put that file in a directory that is in your $PATH and make sure it is marked as executable on Linux.

The other file to copy is the standard library, which is at lib/std.msh in this repo. Download that, put it somewhere. Then set the environment variable $MSHSTDLIB to point to that file location.

An example install script is at install.sh in this repository.

Best way to understand purpose and syntax of mshell is to see it in action. I have ported over many of personal scripts that used to be done with sh or Python in my personal dotfiles. Take a look through this script directory and you'll find many real life examples.

Otherwise, there are some other examples here

Here are some examples.

Better Awk One-liners. Examples from the awk book, translated to mshell. You can run these examples like:

msh file_with_contents.msh < input_file_to_process.txt
awk -f file_with_contents.awk < input_file_to_process.txt
# OR (using 1st example)
msh -c 'sl len wl' < input_file_to_process.txt
awk 'END { print NR }' < input_file_to_process.txt

Note that you'll also need the environment variable MSHSTDLIB pointing to the file at lib/std.msh.

Simpler execution of common shell idioms

• Sublime Text syntax highlighting is available in sublime/msh.sublime-syntax.
• Notepad++ light and dark user-defined language files are available in Notepad++/.
• Vim/Neovim syntax highlighting is available via mshell-vim.
• A language server is bundled with the CLI, providing builtin hover information, completion on @ variables, and scope-aware variable renaming.

• Job control. Right now, if you CTRL-c a long running process, it kills the entire shell.
• Type checking.
• Improved error messages.
• Built in file manager (like Elvish).

• Porth
• Factor
• dt