Ctypes.sh, a foreign function interface for bash

eeZi · on July 28, 2015

rundll32.exe!

Cool stuff. Reminds me of iPython and xonsh.

zurn · on July 28, 2015

Nice. The plugin nature of it does raise the bar a little on using it. Looking forward to the day I can apt-get this in Debian and Ubuntu!

leni536 · on July 28, 2015

I didn't know this "enable -f" feature of bash, it's certainly handy. What are some other interesting binary bash plugins?

I really like this one, most certainly one would use it to build specialized bash libraries that wraps all the ugly stuff. Like a speedy sqlite3 bash library that keeps a database connection open and you can build up transactions by multiple bash commands, it would be a nice alternative to calling sqlite3 multiple times or building a huge sql statement and then calling it once.

imglorp · on July 28, 2015

Probably a great source of security holes, if nothing else :-)

Here's a writeup of how to do plugins: http://www.drdobbs.com/shell-corner-bash-dynamically-loadabl...

I went to school with Chet in the late 80's and never knew about this feature until today. Looks like fun.

buserror · on July 28, 2015

Thats a very cool hack! I personally use 'tcc -run' to call into .so's from the shell, but it's quite limited as far as interfacing back to a shell..

rurban · on July 28, 2015

I started porting it to non-linux systems and would appreciate bsd testers for my version. mingw/cygwin maybe also. see the first issue on gh.

rurban · on July 29, 2015

Thanks to cemeyer freebsd is done. I've added now darwin and potential windows (cygwin+mingw) support. Just need to check how to link to bash on windows, because windows cannot link with unresolved symbols. Had no time to recompile bash on windows yet.

mzs · on July 28, 2015

I had no idea you could do this sort of stuff, it honestly scares me a bit, but is cool, kudos.

FWIW you can get away with a lot from sh with the help of perl (arbitrary syscalls) and debuggers (like gdb, breakpoint and change return values or just call any function). In solaris it's particularly easy with truss and the p* commands.

digi_owl · on July 28, 2015

Getting a bit of a C64 vibe from this...

Adapt · on July 28, 2015

Reminds me of TempleOS.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptGpy5NDplM

anon3_ · on July 28, 2015

I think the similarity you're correlating is memory addresses. You see this a lot if you go into C, especially if you're debugging.

If you think memory addresses are cool, check out GDB + Linux Kernel and how it allows you to examine data structures: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/KernelDebuggingTricks

anon3_ · on July 28, 2015

Very interesting!

For bash or for POSIX shell? Why not just be POSIX compliant so it works everywhere?

creshal · on July 28, 2015

Because it's a binary plug-in to bash, not a shell script, and I don't think POSIX has any mechanism for those.

reycharles · on July 28, 2015

Probably POSIX shell doesn't specify any plugin API.