Building and Installing Oils

Oils is a new Unix shell. This file describes how to configure, build, and install it from the release tarball (NOT the git repo).

This doc is aimed at end users and distro maintainers.

Quick Start

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

tar -x --gz < oils-for-unix-0.28.0.tar.gz
cd oils-for-unix-0.28.0

This is the traditional way to install it:

./configure      # completes very quickly
_build/oils.sh   # 30-60 seconds
sudo ./install

You'll end up with an oils-for-unix binary and two symlinks:

/usr/local/bin/   
  oils-for-unix
  osh -> oils-for-unix
  ysh -> oils-for-unix

This structure is similar to the busybox tool.

OSH behaves like a POSIX shell:

$ osh -c 'echo hi'
hi

The -n flag parses and prints a syntax tree for the 'configure' script:

osh -n configure

YSH is a legacy-free shell, with structured data:

$ ysh -c 'echo hi'
hi

$ ysh -c 'json write ({x: 42})'
{
  "x": 42
}

Oils is designed to have very few dependencies. You need:

Optional:

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

Build deps on Debian-like distros, including Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install build-essential libreadline-dev

Alpine Linux:

apk add libc-dev gcc readline-dev

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

You can run the binary in-place, e.g.

$ _bin/cxx-opt-sh/osh -c 'echo hi'
hi

Or you can install into ~/bin, with the man page at ~/.local/share/man/man1/osh.1:

./configure --prefix ~ --datarootdir ~/.local/share
_build/oils.sh
./install

This doesn't require root access, but it requires:

NOTE: Out-of-tree builds are NOT currently supported, so you have to be in the oils-for-unix-0.28.0 directory.

Show options with:

./configure --help 
_build/oils.sh --help
./install --help

Common flags to configure:

--prefix
--with-readline
--without-readline
--readline  # the location