MPW Shell

MPW Shell is a re-implementation of the Macintosh Programmer's Workshop shell. The primary reason is to support MPW Make (which generated shell script). It may also be useful for other things.

Supported features

• If ... [Else If] ... [Else] ... End
• Begin ... End
• Loop ... End
• For name In [word...] ... End
• Break [If], Continue [If], Exit [If]
• ( ... )
• ||
• &&
• Redirection
• | "pipes" (via a temporary file. Presumably, that's what MPW did as well.)
• Subshells (..., ...)

Not (yet) supported

• aliases
• regular expressions
• text-editing commands (search forward/backward, et cetera)

Builtin Commands

• AboutBox
• Alias
• Catenate
• Directory
• Echo
• Evaluate
• Execute
• Exists
• Export
• Parameters
• Quit
• Quote
• Set
• Shift
• Unalias
• Unexport
• Unset
• Version
• Which

Setup

1. Install MPW. The mpw binary should be somewhere in your $PATH. It also checks /usr/local/bin/mpw and $HOME/mpw/bin/mpw. You can use mpw-shell without it but only with builtin commands.
2. Copy the Startup script to $HOME/mpw/. This script is executed when mpw-shell (or mpw-make) starts up (imagine that) and should be used to set environment variables.

Command Line Flags

-D name=value  Define environment variable
-v             Be verbose (equivalent to -Decho=1)
-f             Ignore the Startup script
-c string      Execute string
-h             Display help