Take a look at ash/atty (Re: separate the shell/interpreter. . .)

[David Fenyes]

In article <2509 at optima.cs.arizona.edu> gudeman at cs.arizona.edu (David Gudeman) writes:
>
>Just to clarify my terms: I would call sh a command language and csh a
>combination of command language and interactive shell.  I wasn't
>suggesting a completely different type of command language like those
>mentioned above (although I think it is a good idea).  My suggestion
>was just to separate the interactive part of the unix shell from the
>command part.  You would run the interactive shell of your choice with
>the interactive command language of your choice; for example you could
>run an interactive shell that implements the csh history mechanism
>with sh as your command language.

There is such a thing in existence--The ash/atty combo by
Kenneth Almquist.  Ash is a sysV /bin/sh replacement that is lean
and fast, and featureful; atty is tty "front-end" that does line
editing and history.  Ash can be compiled to know about ATTY, and send
appropriate escape sequences to control it if present.

Ash will compile & run on almost any UNIX-compatible system from V7 and
Coherent to BSD.  Unfortunately, atty requires the BSD ptys, so I've
never tried it. (I have Coherent)

The pair was posted to comp.sources.unix, volume 19.  I suspect that
If I had BSD, I'd only use this pair.

David Fenyes                                 dfenyes at thesis1.med.uth.tmc.edu
University of Texas Medical School           Houston, Texas