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Building and Installing Oils - old CPython build

Oils is a new Unix shell. This file is INSTALL-old.txt, and it describes how to configure, build, and install the oil-$VERSION tarball.

The tarball contains an older, slower reference implementation based on CPython code.

You may want INSTALL.txt instead, which tells you how to build the fast oils-for-unix-$VERSION tarball.

Quick Start

If you haven't already done so, extract the tarball:

tar -x --xz < oil-0.23.0.tar.xz
cd oil-0.23.0

Either install as /usr/local/bin/osh:

./configure      # completes very quickly
make             # 30-60 seconds
sudo ./install

or install as ~/bin/osh and the man page as ~/.local/share/man/man1/osh.1:

./configure --prefix ~ --datarootdir ~/.local/share
make
./install

The latter doesn't require root access, but it requires:

• ~/bin to be in your $PATH
• Pages under ~/.local/share/man to be found by 'man'. (See manpath or $MANPATH.)

NOTE: Out-of-tree builds are NOT currently supported, so you have to be in the oil-0.23.0 directory.

Smoke Test

OSH behaves like a POSIX shell:

$ osh -c 'echo hi'
hi

This parses and prints a syntax tree for the 'configure' script.

osh -n configure

More Documentation

Every release has a home page with links, e.g.

https://oilshell.org/release/0.23.0/

System Requirements

Roughly speaking, you need:

• an ANSI C environment (compiler and libc)
• GNU Bash
• GNU Make.

(I want to remove the GNU requirements and require only POSIX sh instead).

Optional:

• GNU readline library, for interactive features (https://cnswww.cns.cwru.edu/php/chet/readline/rltop.html)

Debian/Ubuntu and derivatives:

sudo apt install build-essential libreadline-dev

Alpine Linux:

apk add libc-dev gcc bash make readline-dev

OSH has been tested in several Linux distros and OS X. It aims to run on any POSIX system. If it doesn't, file a bug here:

https://github.com/oilshell/oil/issues

Build Options

./configure --help will show the options. Right now, the only significant options are --prefix and --{with,without}-readline.

Notes

• The oil.ovm executable behaves like busybox, and osh is a symlink to it.
• Oil contains a fork of the Python 2.7 runtime, so it should compile with most popular compiler/OS combinations.