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Shell Has a Forth-like Quality

This post takes a short break from ASDL to expand on one of my Hacker News comments.

I realize I haven't done much of what I mentioned in the second sentence of this blog: explain why the Unix shell is interesting. This is partly because almost nobody has questioned this project — it appears programmers do want a better shell.

But there are a aspects of the language design that are rare, and they're worth explaining. This is the first of at least three topics.

Configuring Unix Daemons

Systemd has the stated goal of replacing shell scripts in the boot process of a Linux system.

In response to yet another thread about systemd's design tradeoffs, agumonkey claimed that shell doesn't have enough abstraction power. He suggested instead a Lisp-like configuration system:

( -> ( path "/usr/bin/some-service" "arg0" ... ) ( wrap :pre ( lambda () ... ) :post ( lambda () .. )) ( retry 5 ) ... ( timeout 5 ))

I pointed out that shell already supports this kind of higher-order programming. For example, here's a function that takes a command and tries it five times:

retry () { local n = $1 shift for i in $( seq $n ) ; do " $@ " done }

It can be used like this:

$ retry 5 hello-sleep 0 .1 hello hello hello hello hello

Here we are passing an integer 5 and a code snippet hello-sleep 0.1 to the retry function. Because retry treats code as data, you can call it a higher-order function.

Taking it further, we can compose our retry function with the timeout binary in coreutils by prepending two more words:

$ timeout 0 .3 $0 retry 5 hello-sleep 0 .1 hello hello hello # killed after 0.3 seconds

(Runnable code is available in forth-like directory of the oilshell/blog-code repository).

Because functions can be composed by simple juxtaposition, I said that shell has a Forth-like quality.

In the Forth language, functions can be composed like this because they work on an implicit stack of arguments and return values. If that doesn't make sense, this blog post may help.

Shell doesn't have an implicit stack, but the uniform representation of words in the argv array, and "splicing" with "$@" , results in code that feels similar.

In contrast, this mechanism isn't idiomatic in Python or JavaScript. I tried porting demo.sh to Python with demo.py, and it sort of works if you write all functions like f(*args) . But this goes against the grain of the ecosystem. In these languages, functions and arguments are treated differently from a syntactic and semantic point of view.

daemontools and Bernstein Chaining

In the book The Art of Unix Programming, which is a great exposition of the Unix philosophy, Eric Raymond calls the technique Bernstein chaining.

Daniel J. Bernstein uses this shell technique in software like qmail and daemontools to follow the principle of least privilege.

In contrast to systemd, daemontools is a Unix init toolkit which relies on the idiom of small C programs composed with shell scripts. Celebrating daemontools makes a good case for it and shows examples. Here's an excerpt that uses Bernstein chaining of setuidgid and softlimit , as well as the builtin exec :

# change to the user 'sample', and then limit the stack segment # to 2048 bytes, the number of open file descriptors to 3, and # the number of processes to 1: exec setuidgid sample \ softlimit -n 2048 -o 3 -p 1 \ some-small-daemon -n

Daemontools is minimally documented and doesn't see much use today, but runit has the same architecture, as well as a collection of tiny shell scripts that illustrate its use.

They are admittedly a bit cryptic, but the architecture is what I care about. systemd does separate some of this functionality in a separate systemd-nspawn binary, but it doesn't appear to be used much without the rest of systemd.

Conclusion

daemontools and systemd are interesting because they represent extremes with respect to the modularity of their design.

Since I'm writing a shell, it shouldn't be a surprise that I'm biased toward the style of daemontools. But systemd has valid criticisms of shell scripts. The language has many problems, array syntax being one example.

On the other hand, I wouldn't be surprised if systemd configuration accidentally turns Turing-complete, as shell and make did.

I don't know what the best answer is, but I think that an improved shell will help the situation. At the very least, Lisp isn't necessary. With oil , I aim to preserve the timeless architectural characteristics of shell, while abandoning ugly, inconsistent syntax, and smoothing over its sharp corners.

Appendix: Commands that Compose

Here is a list of tools that can be composed in this Forth-like manner:

sudo : Run a command as another user.

: Run a command as another user. chroot : Run a command with a different root directory.

: Run a command with a different root directory. env : Run a command in a different environment.

: Run a command in a different environment. /usr/bin/time : Run a command and system summarize resource usage.

: Run a command and system summarize resource usage. su : change user ID. This has the questionable interface of taking a shell string with -c instead of passing its remaining args, which leads to quoting problems.

: change user ID. This has the questionable interface of taking a shell string with instead of passing its remaining args, which leads to quoting problems. ssh : Run a command. Also has quoting problems.

: Run a command. Also has quoting problems. strace : Trace system calls and signals.

: Trace system calls and signals. systemd-nspawn

Most tools in daemontools, runit, and other toolkits like s6

gdb : Debug native programs.

These are shell builtins that compose:

exec : Replace the process image; wrapper for the exec() system call.

: Replace the process image; wrapper for the system call. time : In bash, this is a builtin which also takes a block, e.g. time { echo 1; echo 2; } .

: In bash, this is a builtin which also takes a block, e.g. . command and builtin : Change the lookup order of the first word — is it an external command in $PATH or internal to the shell?

Updates (2017/1/24)