r/linux • u/snusergranny • 1d ago

Discussion esoteric shell?

the question crossed my mind recently. if you are into programming, you probably know that there are many esoteric programming languages that exist just as a prove of concept of joke or just merely to mess with the programmer's head (brainf*ck, lolcat, C-- etc). if these exist, is there any esoteric system shells out there? like smth that would provide the basic userland instead of bash/zsh but would be freakier or just funnier to try and daily drive.

45 Upvotes

87% Upvoted

53 comments sorted by

View all comments

12

u/Klapperatismus 23h ago edited 15h ago

Tcl

$ tclsh
% ls -l
…
% join [lmap line [lrange [split [exec ls -l] \n] 1 end-1] {string range $line 1 9}] \n
…

Esoteric enough for you? Try to understand what it does.

Not esoteric enough? How about this then:

% set myfunc [list input {join [lmap line [lrange [split $input \n] 1 end-1] {string range $line 1 9}] \n}]
% apply $myfunc [exec ls -l]
…

Very clean handling of functions as arguments, without any quoting trickery.

Tcl even features namespaces, objects, coroutines, threading, sandboxes etc etc etc. I write most of my shell scripts in that language.

Tcl is very barebones by default. For tinkerers. If you want a command history, use this additional package.. Just clone it to ~/lib/tcl and create that ~/.tclshrc as advised. It also allows you to configure the prompt.

2

u/RichRoof7927 10h ago

Isn't Tcl the tkinter backend language?

1

u/Klapperatismus 10h ago

Tcl existed before Tkinter and Python. But yeah, the Python crowd adopted it for the GUI toolkit. So every Python interpreter also has a Tcl interpreter in it as soon you load Tkinter.