I’ve been building an executable formalization of the POSIX shell semantics, which I’ve been calling smoosh (the Symbolic, Mechanized, Observable, Operational SHell).

I’m pleased to announce an important early milestone: smoosh passes the POSIX test suite (modulo locales, which smoosh doesn’t currently support). I’ve accordingly tagged this ‘morally correct’ verison as smoosh v0.1. You can play around with the latest version via the shtepper, a web-based frontend to a symbolic stepper. I think the shtepper will be particularly useful for those trying to learn the shell or to debug shell scripts.

There’s still plenty to do, of course: there are bugs to fix, quirks to normalize, features to implement, and tests to run. But please: play around with the smoosh shell and the shtepper, file bug reports, and submit patches!