The Perl Shell (psh)
WHAT IT IS:
The Perl Shell (psh) combines aspects of bash and other shells with the power of Perl scripting. It aspires to be your primary login shell.
WHERE IT CAME FROM:
Numerous times when developing Perl code, the author wished for an interactive Perl execution environment in which to try out code snippets. After some looking around, there didn't appear to be a handy solution that acted enough like a shell to be satisfactory. It all might have ended (or rather not bugun) here except that while discussing the idea at lunch with his friend Denny Dahl the pressure finally became too much to bear. That evening, version 0.001 of the Perl Shell was born.
Initially Perl Shell development was privately hosted, with low-tech manual mailing lists. Soon, however, that became too unwieldy and so the project was moved to Source Forge (http://www.sourceforge.net/). Source Forge provides a CVS repository, a release archive, mailing list management and more.
WHO WROTE IT
The original version was written by Gregor N. Purdy, but now there have been numerous contributors, and much of the more advanced functionality was actually implemented by members of the Perl Shell Core Team (see the file psh.pod, or the manpage for psh if you've installed the Perl Shell for more information).
WHERE TO GET IT
The official project home page is:
http://www.focusresearch.com/gregor/psh/index.html
The Source Forge main page for the project is:
http://sourceforge.net/project/?group_id=475
HOW TO USE IT
Download it from one of the locations listed above, and follow the instructions in the INSTALL file. If you want to keep tabs on or participate in development, then join Source Forge and sign up for mailing list memberships. Use anonymous CVS access to keep an up-to-date copy of the code on your system. Become a core developer to get CVS write access.