I maintain the rc shell. This is a reimplementation for Unix, by Byron Rakitzis, of the Plan 9 shell. rc offers much the same capabilities as a traditional Bourne shell, but with a much cleaner syntax.
The latest full release is rc-1.7.1. It's available in tar.gz format. (If you don't have gzip handy, you might like this uncompressed tarball.)
(At one time, releases were also available from the University of Toronto FTP server, but that doesn't seem to be true anymore.)
If you can't retrieve rc from any of these places, please contact me, and we'll work out some way to get it to you.
There are currently no beta releases.
For the foolhardy, snapshots are available in this directory.
The author of the original rc, Tom Duff, presented a paper about it to the UKUUG (United Kingdom Unix Users' Group). He has kindly given permission for us to reproduce the PostScript version of this paper.
An updated HTML version is also available.
The rc mailing list was rc@hawkwind.utcs.utoronto.ca but this seems to be defunct at present.
(Subscription requests should be sent to rc-request@hawkwind.utcs.utoronto.ca.)
rc can be linked against a number of libraries which provide Emacs style command line editing and history.
- GNU readline is available from the FSF master archive and its many mirrors.
- A lightweight alternative is editline. The latest version is editline-1.5.
- Another alternative is vrl. The current version is vrl-1.3.3.
rc uses a set of printing routines originally written by Paul Haahr. Scott Schwartz has developed this as a separate package which is available from comp.sources.unix v29i017.
There are a number of other programs which, like rc, implementations of Plan 9 tools for Unix + X windows:
(Many of these links are now out of date. Watch this space!)
- sam, probably the world's finest editor, by Rob Pike;
- wily, a reimplementation of the Plan 9 acme (a minimalist "integrated development environment") by Gary Capell;
- 9term, an X windows terminal emulator by James Matthew Farrow;
- 9wm, an X window manager by David Hogan;
- 9menu (allows you to create X menus from the shell, where each menu item will run a command: it meshes well with 9wm).
Plan 9 itself, including Duff's original rc, is now available (and there's a rather splendid easy-to-install port of all this to Unix, but I don't have the link handy right now: watch this space!)
Any patches for rc can be found in the patch directory.
I've started making notes as I hack on rc. Anyone who is, or would like to be, familiar with the internals of rc is encouraged to look at them.
Searching on AltaVista (anyone remember it?) for "rc shell", I came across this page, which seems to be about something else...
Tim Goodwin
Problems? Comments? Questions? Contact us by email!