I've been dinking around with <a href="http://www.webcom.com/~haahr/es/es-usenix-winter93.html">es</a>, which is pretty neat, but didn't have my bash standbys (CTRL-R incremental search, ! history manipulation). Well, turns out that all my beloved bashisms are actually Gnu Readline-isms. Here's a joke shell that handles control characters, reverse search, history expansion, etc.:

<div class="source">
// gcc jokesh.c -o jokesh -l readline
#include &lt;stdio.h&gt;
extern char *readline(char *);
extern void add_history(char *);

int main (int argc, char **argv) {
        char *r, *s;

        while (1) {
                r = readline("> ");
                history_expand(r, &s);
                if (s && *s) {
                        add_history(s);
                        system(s); // yeah, yeah, i'm using sh for | and pathing
                }
                if (r && free(r))
                         r = (char *) NULL;
                if (s && free(s)) 
                        s = (char *) NULL;
        }
        exit(0);
}
</div>

That's it. So, it turned out to be really trivial to add the "bash" features I wanted to es.