Stand-alone shell

sash

Screenshotof the sash shell
Developer(s)	David Bell
Stable release	v3.8 (March 2014(2014-03))
Operating system	Unix-like
Type	Embedded
Website	members.tip.net.au/~dbell/

Stand-alone shell(sash) is aUnix shelldesigned for use in recovering from certain types of system failures and errors.

The built-in commands of sash have alllibraries linked statically,so unlike most shells on Linux, the standardUNIXcommands do not rely on external libraries. For example, the copy command (cp) requireslibc.soandld-linux.sowhen built fromGNU Core UtilitiesonLinux.If any of these libraries get corrupted, the coreutils cp command would not work; however, in sash, the built-in command, cp, would be unaffected.

In earlier times, most critical commands (including shells) in /sbin or even /bin were statically linked for this purpose, whereas in /usr/sbin and /usr/bin you would find the more feature-rich versions that were dynamically linked. This is not common anymore and as such, statically linked shells with built-in commands have become more important.

Sash has the followingbuilt-incommands:

ar,chattr,chgrp,chmod,chown,cmp,cp,dd,echo,ed,exec,grep,file,find,gunzip,gzip,kill,losetup,ln,ls,lsattr,mkdir,mknod,rmdir,sum,sync,tar,touch,umount,where

The Sash shell has also been ported to work withAndroidin aterminal-interface.

sash-plus-patches

sash-plus-patchesis a collection of patches for sash. The key features are thechroot,pivot root,andlosetupcommands. However, these functions are available in newer versions of sash. These functions provide interfaces to the respective Linux system calls. They are especially useful when sash is used in an initial ramdisk ( "initrd") environment. In addition, simple shell variable expansion support has been added; e.g., the variable" $(VAR) "is replaced by the content of theenvironment variable"VAR".

Some Linux distributions, such asDebianandSlackware(via SlackBuilds.org), have this available.

See also

• BusyBox
• Toybox
• Comparison of computer shells

Sources

• sash - Linux man pageArchived2011-08-20 at theWayback Machine

External links

• sash homepage