How to cite this paper

Lee, David A. “xmlsh - a command language (shell) based on the philosophy of the Unix Shells, designed for XML.” Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2008, Montréal, Canada, August 12 - 15, 2008. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2008. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 1 (2008). https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol1.Lee01.

Balisage: The Markup Conference 2008
August 12 - 15, 2008

Balisage Paper: xmlsh - a command language (shell) based on the philosophy of the Unix Shells, designed for XML

David A. Lee

Epocrates

David Lee has over 25 years experience in the software industry in companies including Epocrates, Sun Microsystems, IBM, Centura Software, Premenos, Epiphany, WebGain, and Nexstra. As senior member of the technical staff of Epocrates, Inc., Mr. Lee is responsible for managing data integration, publishing, storage, retrieval, and processing of clinical knowledge databases.

Copyright © David A. Lee, 2008

Abstract

xmlsh, an Open Source project, is a command language (shell) modeled after the philosophy of traditional Unix Shells but designed to support XML natively. Largely backwards compatible with the unix shells, xmlsh is designed for both interactive and script use. It has built-in support for XML data (documents and sequences) as expressions, variables, files and pipelines. Support for full multithreading xml and text pipelines as well as direct execution of OS processes in and commands in portable and familiar syntax allows developers to construct complex jobs composed of xml tasks and traditional text and file operations easily and portably. Written in "pure java", and integrated closely with the Saxon XQuery and XSLT library, xmlsh is portable to any platform which runs the java 1.6 JDK.