Stand-alone Shell

Screenshot of the sash shell

Stand-alone shell (sash) is a Unix shell designed for use in recovering from certain types of system failures.

The built in commands of sash have all libraries linked statically, so unlike most shells, the standard UNIX commands do not rely on external libraries. For example the copy command (cp) requires linux-gate.so, libc.so, and ld-linux.so when built from GNU coreutils on Linux. If any of these libraries get corrupted, the coreutils cp command would not work, however in sash, the built-in command, cp, would be unaffected.

Sash has the following built-in commands:

-ar, -chattr, -chgrp, -chmod, -chown, -cmp, -cp, -dd, -echo, -ed, -grep, -file, -find, -gunzip, -gzip, -kill, -losetup, -ln, -ls, -lsattr, -mkdir, -mknod, -rmdir, -sum, -sync, -tar, -touch, -umount, -where

sash-plus-patches

sash-plus-patches is a collection of patches for the well known standalone shell, sash. The key features are the -chroot, -pivot_root, and -losetup commands. These functions provide interfaces to the respective Linux system calls. They are especially useful when sash is used in a initial ramdisk ("initrd") environment. In addition, simple shell variable expansion support has been added. e.g. the variable "$(VAR)" is replaced by the content of the environment variable "VAR".

Some Linux distros, such as Debian and Slackware (via SlackBuilds.org) have this available.

See also

• BusyBox
• Comparison of computer shells

References

• sash - Linux man page
• $ ldd /bin/cp

  linux-gate.so.1 => (0xffffe000)

  libc.so.6 => /lib/libc.so.6 (0xb7eb2000)

  /lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0xb7fe3000)

External links

• sash homepage