Sagacious fellow monks,

Having been a huge fan of Unix/Linux over the years, and preferred its command-line power to Windows since, well, forever, I've often toyed with the idea of creating a Perl script to run in a "cmd" window, and mimic some of the more useful constructs of tcsh and bash.  But surely, something like this must have been done already?

I know about Cygwin already, and I've tried googling for similar solutions in Perl, but haven't found anything which worked simply and reliably the way I want it to.  Before setting out to try to create my own, I thought I'd ask whether anyone knows of something that fits the bill.

Of course, I would like to have:

  1. Pass unknown commands directly to the real shell
  2. History (both command-line and ennumerated)
  3. Alias lists (in the style of tcsh)
  4. Variable assignment and substitution
  5. Job control

And as I said, if such a thing exists, please let me know so that I (and others reading) can try it out.

But if there really might be a need for such a tool, and if I decide it's worth embarking on (re)inventing my own version, I would also want to give thought to clever constructs to ease some of the obstacles I always come up against in Windows.

For example, it might be nice to have a construct which, in place of a directory name, creates a mini Tk popup with the user's most commonly accessed directories (and ability to browse any of them), to help choose a directory for the resulting command to cd to, or perform some other command in.

So, can anyone share their relevant ideas on this?

And if you were to design your own ideal Windows filter/shell, what commands might it support?

In reply to Has a Windows-based tcsh-like shell been created in Perl yet ...? by liverpole

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