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Warning: Work in progress! Leave feedback on Zulip or Github if you'd like this doc to be updated.

Oil Documentation

The Oil project aims to transform Unix shell into a better programming language. It's our upgrade path from bash.

Preliminaries

• What is Oil? High-level descriptions of the project.
• The Oil Language From 10,000 Feet A tour of Oil.
• INSTALL. How do I install Oil? This text file is also in the tarball.

OSH is a Compatible Shell

• OSH User Manual. How do I use OSH as my shell?
• Known Differences is trivia for advanced users. It lists differences between OSH and other shells.
• errexit (in progress)

Oil is a New Shell Language

• Options. Parsing and runtime options turn OSH into Oil.
• Oil Keywords. Oil introduces new keywords. (Shell keyword aren't discussed.)
• Oil Expressions The Expression Language is Mostly Python.
• Procs, Funcs, and Blocks
• Oil Builtins (Shell builtins aren't discussed.)
• Word Language - Oil extends the "word language".
  • Special Variables
• Egg Expressions. Oil has a new regex syntax called "egg expressions", abbreviated eggexes.

Future:

• Error Handling

More

These docs span both OSH and Oil.

• Index of Help Topics (incomplete). This document underlies the help builtin, and gives examples of each Oil feature. It links to sections in the Help page.
• Command vs. Expression Mode An important syntactic concept. See the overview for more syntactic concepts.
• Unicode

Internal Details:

• Data Model -- The interpreter.
  • TODO: Rules for scope
• Architecture Notes -- The interpreter
• Error List

For Contributors

• README.md. If you want to modify Oil, start here. We welcome contributions!
• Github Wiki for oilshell/oil