Building and Installing OSH

OSH is a bash-compatible shell, and is part of the Oil project (http://www.oilshell.org).

This file describes how to install OSH. (It's in the release tarball and also published on the web.)

Quick Start

If you haven't already done so, extract the tarball:

tar -x --xz < oil-0.1.0.tar.xz
cd oil-0.1.0

Either install as /usr/local/bin/osh:

./configure      # completes very quickly
make             # 30-60 seconds
sudo ./install

or install as ~/bin/osh:

./configure --prefix ~
make
./install

The latter doesn't require root access, but it requires ~/bin to be in your PATH.

NOTE: Out-of-tree builds are NOT currently supported, so you have to be in the oil-0.1.0 directory.

Smoke Test

OSH behaves like a POSIX shell:

$ osh -c 'echo hi'
hi

This parses and prints a syntax tree for the 'configure' script.

osh -n configure

System Requirements

Roughly speaking, you need:

• an ANSI C environment (compiler and libc)
• GNU Bash
• GNU Make.

(I want to eventually remove the GNU requirements and require just POSIX sh instead).

Optional:

• GNU readline library, for interactive features (https://cnswww.cns.cwru.edu/php/chet/readline/rltop.html)

Debian/Ubuntu and derivatives:

sudo apt install build-essential libreadline-dev

Alpine Linux:

apk add libc-dev gcc bash make readline-dev

OSH hasn't been tested on non-Linux systems, but eventually it should run on any POSIX-compatible system.

Build Options

./configure --help will show the options. Right now, the only significant options are --prefix and --{with,without}-readline.

Notes

• The oil executable behaves like busybox, and osh is a symlink to it. Compare oil --help vs. osh --help.
• OSH uses a slight fork of the Python 2.7 runtime, so it should compile with most popular compiler/OS combinations.

TODO

• Add back build support for PGO and LTO and document them. (CPython has this.)