In fact, we started off with two or three different shells and the shell had life of its own.

With apologies to Ken Thompson, this is a list derived from the wafflings residents of a certain UK IRC channel. The conversation happened several years ago but I was reminded of it again today from a conversation on that same channel.

No names have been kept to project the guilty.


/bin/bush - a shell that steals and lies?
/bin/cash - displays adverts before each prompt
/bin/crash - Microsoft shell
/bin/mash - requires libsausage.so
/bin/hush - terse output
/bin/irish - only shell that finds jerkcity funny
/bin/rush - über-optimised for speed, but might not actually work correctly
/bin/flash - proprietary shell that displays adverts and cartoons and hangs periodically
/bin/welsh - whinges about people not using it, but then steals features from other shells in order to actually make sense
/bin/rehash - never actually runs any program, just uses markov chains to construct output from stuff it has seen before.
/bin/wash - will remove lint in your scripts if you let it
/bin/parish - prays for the successful exit of every command
/bin/punish - symlink to /bin/csh
/bin/sheepish - apologises when $? is not zero
/bin/diminsh - decrements all result codes by one
/bin/lavish - and you thought bashisms were bad...
/bin/brainwash - once you've tried it, you'll believe it's the only shell in existence
/bin/hoggish - written in Java
/bin/reversepolish - arguments order different in go must
/bin/ganesh - no subprocess dares exit zero for fear of being removed from the system
/bin/roguish - every day is April 1st as far as it is concerned
/bin/macintosh - it's shiny, has *loads* of things you think you can poke at, yet it only actually responds to a single key on the keyboard and has no useful features for fear of confusing the user
/bin/lush - garbles output from processes like a drunkard
/bin/snobbish - you're not good enough to use it
/bin/thrush - it itches
/bin/vanquish - kills processes mercilessly
/bin/tush - pert
/bin/fetish -> /bin/zsh
/bin/skirmish - multi-user shell
/bin/whiplash - gets invoked if you break too hard
/bin/newsflash - BREAKING NEWS pid 1234 terminated
/bin/mulish - DJB does Shell
/bin/hsilop - arguments order different in go must
/bin/whitewash - government approved
/bin/trish - for tri-state hardware
/bin/jdsh - it sucks...
/bin/flesh - optimised for viewing p0rn