Headless Mode

Back to Interactive Shell

Tips

• Use run --push-globals -- myfunc to avoid clobbering $? and other VM globals.
  • Note that run also runs the function with errexit on, which is probably what you want.
  • TODO: should be provide a way to load a function ahead of time? Like --rcfile but doesn't replace the user's oshrc ?

Resources

• https://www.oilshell.org/release/latest/doc/headless.html
• Shell as an Engine for a GUI or TUI: https://github.com/oilshell/oil/issues/738
• web_shell prototype: https://github.com/subhav/web_shell/blob/master/command_server.sh
  • descriptor passing would be nice. Uses LD_PRELOAD to trick bash into thinking it's running from a terminal.
• #shell-gui on Zulip has many discussions: https://oilshell.zulipchat.com/#narrow/stream/266977-shell-gui

TODO

• Demo of how to pass a pipe, and e.g. dump JSON (is our json builtin stable? Or does read --json and read --qtt make more sense?)
• Document "registers" ?
• More docs on how to implement a headless client. Join #shell-gui on Zulip for discussion!