Sure, and it means exactly what you expect it to mean in ruby (though tinged with 'bad idea', in the case of aliasing variable names), so that's even more reason to use it (find a way to mesh with irb or whatever they're using as 'backend'). It's 'ruby shell' after all.
(slight ot, sorry!) This brings back great memories of one of the best assignment from my college time: We had an "Agile web development" course (~2007) with a precursory Ruby 101 workshop as well as a pre-course assignment to "create a shell in Ruby". It was such a joy to hack on this and learn that way. It was clearly wayyy too vast of a task to ever _complete_ it, but I learned so much Ruby there and couldn't stop working on the project. Thanks Carsten Bormann for being a great teacher!
Seconded. Naming an interactive language shell after ssh's older, insecure cousin just seems like begging for trouble.
I'm imagining some auditor seeing an "rsh" binary on a Linux system and dinging the system on it, and weeks of back and forth emails and meetings required to determine that, no, in fact, this is not remote shell, it's Ruby shell, and it's actually not a valid audit finding.
And, of course, that's completely omitting the binary collision issue because frankly anybody with "old" rsh installed deserves whatever pain they get.
I think this is not a general shell like bash or csh, more of a custom REPL for some specific set of commands. A critical feature of every other shell is how they handle pipes, and this one doesn't seem to have gotten that far yet.
Perhaps it would have been better to wrap the limited shell functionalities in in gem instead, and run that inside `irb`. Currently the majority of the lines appears to be reimplementing a REPL, but those would come for free with `irb`.
But the outputs of those system() calls aren't accessible to rsh, unlike other shells where I might be able to do VARIABLE=$(command). I was looking for something more like IO.popen() and rsh does not seem to have those.
Not the same thing though. Windows Terminal is a terminal emulator. Rsh is a shell. Assuming rsh runs fine on windows, one could make another profile in Windows Terminal that starts in rsh.
WSL and you just can completely avoid Windows Terminal if you work on Windows but not with Windows. I.e I do devops, linux development in my Windows Box running an openSUSE box in WSL. It integrates pretty well with visual code for instance.
Just, why? Everything else calls them aliases. Everyone knows what an alias is.
Is this something that works differently and so needs a different name?
If 'alias' was a badly chosen 'standard', then there's a case to try to change it, but 'alias' seems to be quite precise and fitting to me.