[plug] Advice on Shells

[Peter Wright]

Hi Brad,

On Wed, Feb 28, 2001 at 11:19:37AM +0800, Brad Campbell wrote:
> G'day all,
> I'm stuffing around building extremely low memory/disk footprint
> systems for embedded development at the moment.
> I'm after some advice on shells. 
> Currently I'm using bash from debian potato, and it does exactly what
> i want, but is ~400k linked against shared libc
[ snip ]
> SO, the question is, is there a shell that provides..
> --Commandline completion
> --Command history
> --bash compatible scripting

Well, in an attempt to provide advocacy pretending to be advice :)...

Seriously, zsh might be worth a look.

The stripped zsh 3.1.6 executable on my Debian system is about 350k.
However, I know the source for zsh 3.0.* is significantly smaller and the
executable should therefore also be quite a bit smaller (and still has the
features you require).

NB. 3.0.* is the "stable" version, 3.1.* is the "development" version, just
that it's been in dev so long it's really no less stable than the "stable"
version to my mind.

Both for bash and zsh, you _may_ be able to compile versions that leave out
some features in order to further reduce their size.

Alternatively, you could take the ash source and just add in commandline
completion - because aside from that one feature, ash is pretty close to
what you want. :)

> ?
> Brad....

Pete.
-- 
http://cygnus.uwa.edu.au/~pete/

--
ARTHUR: CHARGE!
   [The mighty ARMY charges.  Thundering noise of feet.  Clatter of coconuts.
   Shouts etc.   Suddenly there is a wail of a siren and a couple of police
   cars roar round in front of the charging ARMY and the POLICE leap out and
   stop them.  TWO POLICEMAN and the HISTORIAN'S WIFE.  Black Marias skid up
   behind them.]
HISTORIAN'S WIFE: They're the ones, I'm sure.
                 "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" PYTHON (MONTY) PICTURES LTD