Qshell is an optional

command-line interpreter A command-line interpreter or command-line processor uses a command-line interface (CLI) to receive commands from a user in the form of lines of text. This provides a means of setting parameters for the environment, invoking executables and pro ...

(

shell Shell may refer to: Architecture and design * Shell (structure), a thin structure ** Concrete shell, a thin shell of concrete, usually with no interior columns or exterior buttresses ** Thin-shell structure Science Biology * Seashell, a hard ou ...

) for the IBM i operating system. Qshell is based on

POSIX The Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX) is a family of standards specified by the IEEE Computer Society for maintaining compatibility between operating systems. POSIX defines both the system- and user-level application programming interf ...

and

X/Open X/Open group (also known as the Open Group for Unix Systems and incorporated in 1987 as X/Open Company, Ltd.) was a consortium founded by several European UNIX systems manufacturers in 1984 to identify and promote open standards in the field of info ...

standards. It is a

Bourne Bourne may refer to: Places UK * Bourne, Lincolnshire, a town ** Bourne Abbey ** Bourne railway station * Bourne (electoral division), West Sussex * Bourne SSSI, Avon, a Site of Special Scientific Interest near Burrington, North Somerset * Bourne ...

-like shell that also includes features of

KornShell KornShell (ksh) is a Unix shell which was developed by David Korn at Bell Labs in the early 1980s and announced at USENIX on July 14, 1983. The initial development was based on Bourne shell source code. Other early contributors were Bell ...

. The utilities (or commands) are external programs that provide additional functions. The development team of Qshell had to deal with platform-specific issues such as translating between

ASCII ASCII ( ), abbreviated from American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for electronic communication. ASCII codes represent text in computers, telecommunications equipment, and other devices. Because of ...

and

EBCDIC Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code (EBCDIC; ) is an eight-bit character encoding used mainly on IBM mainframe and IBM midrange computer operating systems. It descended from the code used with punched cards and the corresponding six- ...

. The shell supports interactive mode as well as

batch processing Computerized batch processing is a method of running software programs called jobs in batches automatically. While users are required to submit the jobs, no other interaction by the user is required to process the batch. Batches may automatically ...

and can run

shell script A shell script is a computer program designed to be run by a Unix shell, a command-line interpreter. The various dialects of shell scripts are considered to be scripting languages. Typical operations performed by shell scripts include file manip ...

s from

Unix-like A Unix-like (sometimes referred to as UN*X or *nix) operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, although not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification. A Unix-li ...

operating systems with few or no modifications.

Commands

The following is a list of commands that are supported by the Qshell

on IBM i 7.4.

Differences from other Unix shells

Qshell does not support the

redirection operator In computing, redirection is a form of interprocess communication, and is a function common to most command-line interpreters, including the various Unix shells that can redirect standard streams to user-specified locations. In Unix-like opera ...

or provide a

command history Command history is a feature in many operating system shells, computer algebra programs, and other software that allows the user to recall, edit and rerun previous commands. Command line history was added to Unix in Bill Joy's C shell of 1978 ...

. It also has no job control support as IBM i operating system does not have the concept of a foreground or

background process A background process is a computer process that runs ''behind the scenes'' (i.e., in the background) and without user intervention. Typical tasks for these processes include logging, system monitoring, scheduling, and user notification. The backgr ...

group. The POSIX standard and built-in commands are therefore not available as well.

Compared to PASE for i

According to IBM, QSHELL is a “

Unix Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and ot ...

-like” interface built over

IBM i IBM i (the ''i'' standing for ''integrated'') is an operating system developed by IBM for IBM Power Systems. It was originally released in 1988 as OS/400, as the sole operating system of the IBM AS/400 line of systems. It was renamed to i5/OS in ...

. The commands issued by the user point to programs in a “Qshell” library. It began as a port from the ash shell, which was a Bourne-like shell created by

Berkeley Software Design Berkeley Software Design, Inc. (BSDI or, later, BSDi), was a corporation which developed, sold licenses for, and supported BSD/OS (originally known as BSD/386), a commercial and partially proprietary variant of the BSD Unix operating system for P ...

References

External links

*
Exploring iSeries QSHELL
{{Unix shells Command shells Interpreters (computing) IBM operating systems

Commands

Differences from other Unix shells

Compared to PASE for i

See also

References

Further reading

External links