A Lisp Interpreter for Shell Scripting
Redstart is a lightweight Lisp interpreter written in C++ with a focus on shell scripting. It lets you combine the expressive power of Lisp with the practicality of the Unix shell: you can run commands, capture output, pipe between processes, and still use Lisp syntax for logic and structure. Think of it as writing your shell scripts in Lisp instead of Bash.
A Lisp Interpreter for Shell Scripting launched on October 8, 2025 with 114 votes, #272 of 8,178 launches that month and more than 95% of that year's launches. The site was still online in September 2026, 1 year on.
In plain words
Redstart is a lightweight Lisp interpreter written in C++ that enables shell scripting using Lisp syntax instead of Bash. It combines Lisp's expressive logic and structure with Unix shell capabilities, allowing users to run commands, capture output, and pipe between processes. The tool is designed for developers who want functional programming features while maintaining practical system administration tasks.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
A Lisp Interpreter for Linux Shell Scripting, written in C++. - gue-ni/redstart
Redstart (named after the bird ) is a lightweight Lisp interpreter written in C++ with a focus on shell scripting. It lets you combine the expressive power of Lisp with the practicality of the Unix shell: you can run commands, capture output, pipe between processes, and still use Lisp syntax for logic and structure. Think of it as writing your shell scripts in Lisp instead of Bash. bash <( curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/gue-ni/redstart/refs/heads/master/tools/install.sh ) Quickstart # Start the REPL rst # Run a script rst my_script.lsp Examples ; pipe output of 'ls' to 'grep' (pipe (sh ls -la) (sh grep " *.txt " )) ; save the output of 'cat' to variable 'content' ( defvar content…from github.com
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Source: Show HN post ↗
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