#shish

A small POSIX-ish shell in C. One static binary, no stdio, no printf — around 139 KB stripped, and it compiles to 184 KB of WebAssembly that runs in a browser tab.

shish -c 'for f in *.c; do echo "${f%.c}"; done'

• Small. 139 KB stripped on x86-64 (dash 126 KB, bash 1.4 MB, busybox 2.0 MB), built against an in-tree copy of Felix von Leitner's libowfat (lib/) instead of the C library's formatted I/O.
• Self-contained. cat, rm, mkdir, mktemp, ln, chmod, basename, dirname, uname, which and friends are compile-time builtins. A script can run with PATH= empty and no /bin at all.
• Portable. CMake cross-build presets for glibc, musl, dietlibc, mingw32/64, MSYS, Android, Termux, aarch64, Emscripten and WASI.
• Auditable. ~26 k lines of C, one function per file, no dynamic language runtime, no history file, no startup file it did not ask for.

#Status

shish is alpha, and not a drop-in /bin/sh. It runs the shell language — pipelines, redirections, functions, case, loops, parameter expansion, arithmetic, job control, traps — and it passes 5541 cases of yash's POSIX conformance suite, but there are 551 it still fails and a list of known defects in undefined. Do not put it under init yet.

See Conformance for what actually works today, and undefined for what is being fixed next.

#Build

cmake -S . -B build/x86_64-linux-gnu
cmake --build build/x86_64-linux-gnu -j

That produces shish (the shell) and shformat (a pretty-printer that reuses the parser). See Building for cross-compiling, static linking, and picking which builtins get compiled in.

#Documentation

#Name

sh-ish, because it is derived from sh; shisha, the water pipe, since shells and pipes are related topics; and shish kebab, which is a nice Turkish meal.

#Licence

GPL v2 — see undefined. lib/ is a copy of Felix von Leitner's libowfat, under its own terms.