I wanted to play around with Bash builtins when I realized that they had special characteristics I could exploit for improving performance in some of my more ambitious scripts. Unable to find much in the way of documentation, I downloaded the Bash source code and referred to the standard builtins while I started experiments.
I was happy to find that builtins did indeed deliver what I had hoped: that a C program could run in the same process as Bash script, and a C program could call back to a function in the script.
There are several details to which one must attend in order to develop a working Bash builtin. To avoid missing any of the details, I created a template with skeletal source files and a Makefile. The basic template spawned several more targeted templates. The last template, basic_handle, continues to get attention as I add tools and other code.
The Bash-Builtin headers must be installed in order to compile the examples.
sudo apt-get install bash-builtinsThe project preserves two phases of development, the experimental phase consisting of several small projects, and a ongoing phase of developing templates that can jump-start new projects.
The README document of the experimental phase is the original project README file. It lists the source files and their learning objectives, and describes how to build and test them.
The files of the experimentation phase are found in the main project directory.
The experiment phase of the project is mostly complete. The experiments are found in the main project directory and are described in the README file.