h4sh -- Haskell functions for shell scripting Unix is all about programs that do one thing, and one thing well. Unfortunately, over time, the common unix text processing commands have become bloated and silly, with rather arbitrary features for programs that should have simple semantics (consider uniq and wc outputting leading space, or cut indexing fields from 1, just for starters). On the other hand Haskell has a powerful and beautiful List library for processing text as lists of strings. h4sh exposes the Haskell List library as a set of shell utilities. Utilising function composition via pipes, we can transparently program in Haskell, in the shell :) Commands are generated from a description of their type. Higher order functions like map are handled using runtime evaluation, provided by the hs-plugins System.Eval library, allowing arbitrary Haskell code to be provided as arguments to, for example, map and filter. A (contrived) example: take -n 100 f | id | map -e show.length | filter -e '/= "0"' | sort | reverse | head Get it: http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/h4sh.html darcs get --partial http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/code/h4sh -- Don Stewart