Perl Shell (psh)

Perl Shell (psh) combines aspects of bash and other shells with the power of Perl scripting. Some of its features:

• Globbing: grep foo lib/**/*.pm
• Redirects, including to file handles: command >[=FOO]
• Inline filters: ls | { print ++$i, ": $_"; }q (adds line numbers)
• Inline grep filters: netstat | { $_[1]>2; }g
• Inline substitution filters: ls | s/y/k/
• ... and more

Genesis

Numerous times when developing Perl code, I (Gregor) wished for an interactive Perl execution environment in which to try out code snippets. After some looking around, I didn't see a handy solution that acted enough like a shell to be satisfactory. It all might have ended (or rather not begun) here except that while discussing the idea at lunch with my friend Denny Dahl the pressure finally became too much to bear. That evening, version 0.001 of the Perl Shell was born.

Initially Perl Shell development was privately hosted, with low-tech manual mailing lists. Soon that became too unwieldy so I moved the project to Source Forge where they provided a CVS repository (now Subversion), a release archive, mailing list management and more. Years later in 2010 I moved the project to GitHub, although the mailing lists are still hosted at Source Forge.

Contributors

The original version was written by Gregor N. Purdy, Sr. but now there have been numerous contributors, and much of the more advanced functionality was actually implemented by members of the Perl Shell Core Team (see the file psh.pod, or the manpage for psh if you've installed Perl Shell for more information).