The slash book

The system level language for getting the job done.

Motivation

Bash is an awesome shell, but for shell programming, bash is very antiquated, arcane, hard to reason about and just plain annoying to implement any logic in.

Slash is a shell programming language, not a shell. It has a very compact standalone binary and allows for higher level constructs and for many a familiar syntax. At the same time, traditional process spawning is a first order language element.

The language is inspired by the C-like extension languages (JavaScript, C#, Rust) and should pose few surprised to programmers familiar with those languages. It also contains elements from traditional shell scripting languages like ash and bash, but purely around the syntax for spawning subprocesses, pipes and redirects.

Slash is a very tiny language with almost no support library as the intention is to rely on the standard unix toolbox. Slash also works on Windows, but the primitives in windows are not as strong as in unix.