Language Tour

Table of Contents

Introduction

murex is a typed shell. By this we mean it still passes byte streams along POSIX pipes (and thus will work with all your existing command line tools) but in addition will add annotations to describe the type of data that is being written and read. This allows murex to expand upon your command line tools with some really interesting and advanced features not available in traditional shells.

POSIX is a set of underlying standards that Linux, macOS and various other operating systems support.

Read–Eval–Print Loop

If you want to learn more about the interactive shell then there is a dedicated document detailing murex’s REPL features.

Barewords

Shells need to balance scripting with an efficient interactive terminal interface. One of the most common approaches to solving that conflict between readability and terseness is to make heavy use of barewords. Barewords are ostensibly just instructions that are not quoted. In our case, command names and command parameters.

murex also makes heavy use of barewords and so that places requirements on the choice of syntax we can use.

Expressions and Statements

An expression is an evaluation, operation or assignment, for example:

» 6 > 5
» fruit = %[ apples oranges bananas ]
» 5 + 5

Expressions are type sensitive

Whereas a statement is a shell command to execute:

» echo "Hello Murex"
» kill 1234

All values in a statement are treated as strings

Due to the expectation of shell commands supporting bareword parameters, expressions have to be parsed differently to statements. Thus murex first parses a command line to see if it is a valid expression, and if it is not, it then assumes it is an statement and parses it as such.

This allow expressions and statements to be used interchangeably in a pipeline:

» 5 + 5 | grep 10

Functions and Methods

A function is command that doesn’t take data from STDIN whereas a method is any command that does.

echo "Hello Murex" | grep "Murex"
^ a function         ^ a method

In practical terms, functions and methods are executed in exactly the same way however some builtins might behave differently depending on whether values are passed via STDIN or as parameters. Thus you will often find references to functions and methods, and sometimes for the same command, within these documents.

The Bang Prefix

Some murex builtins support a bang prefix. This prefix alters the behavior of those builtins to perform the conceptual opposite of their primary role.

For example, to define a variable you might set foo=bar but to undefine it you would !set foo.

The details for each supported bang prefix will be in the documents for their respective builtin.

Rosetta Stone

If you already know Bash and looking for the equivalent syntax in murex, then our Rosetta Stone reference will help you to translate your Bash code into murex code.

Basic Syntax

Quoting Strings

It is important to note that all strings in expressions are quoted whereas strings in statements can be barewords.

There are three ways to quote a string in murex:

Code Comments

You can comment out a single like, or end of a line with #:

# this is a comment

echo Hello Murex # this is also a comment

Multiple lines or mid-line comments can be achieved with /# and #/ tokens:

/#
This is
a multi-line
command
#/

echo Hello /# comment #/ Murex

(/# was chosen because it is similar to C-style comments however /* is a valid glob so murex has substituted the asterisks with a hash symbol instead)

Variables

All variables are defined with one of three key words:

…or via an expression:

If any variables are unset then reading from them will produce an error (under murex’s default behavior):

» echo $foobar
Error in `echo` (1,1): variable 'foobar' does not exist

Please note that when using set and global as a function, all assignments will be strings unless you specifically annotate your variables.

Type Inference

In general, murex will try to infer the data type of a variable or pipe. It can do this by checking the Content-Type HTTP header, the file name extension or just looking at how that data was constructed (when defined via expressions). However sometimes you may need to annotate your types. Read more

Scalars

In traditional shells, variables are expanded in a way that results in spaces be parsed as different command parameters. This results in numerous problems where developers need to remember to enclose variables inside quotes.

murex parses variables as tokens and expands them into the command line arguments intuitively. So, there are no more accidental bugs due to spaces in file names, or other such problems due to developers forgetting to quote variables. For example:

» file = "file name.txt"
» touch $file # this would normally need to be quoted
» ls
'file name.txt'

Arrays

Due to variables not being expanded into arrays by default, murex supports an additional variable construct for arrays. These are @ prefixed:

» files = %[file1.txt, file2.txt, file3.txt]
» touch @files
» ls
file1.txt  file2.txt

Piping and Redirection

Pipes

murex supports multiple different pipe tokens. The main two being | and ->.

In murex scripts you can use | and -> interchangeably, so there’s no need to remember which commands are methods and which are not. The difference only applies in the interactive shell where -> can be used with tab-autocompletion to display a shortlist of supported functions that can manipulate the data from the previous command. It’s purely a clue to the parser to generate different autocompletion suggestions to help with your discovery of different commandline tools.

Redirection

Redirection of stdout and stderr is very different in murex. There is no support for the 2> or &1 tokens, instead you name the pipe inside angle brackets, in the first parameter(s).

out is that processes stdout (fd1), err is that processes stderr (fd2), and null is the equivalent of piping to /dev/null.

Any pipes prefixed by a bang means reading from that processes stderr.

So to redirect stderr to stdout you would use <!out>:

err <!out> "error message redirected to stdout"

And to redirect stdout to stderr you would use <err>:

out <err> "output redirected to stderr"

Likewise you can redirect either stdout, or stderr to /dev/null via <null> or <!null> respectively.

command <!null> # ignore stderr
command <null>  # ignore stdout

You can also create your own pipes that are files, network connections, or any other custom data input or output endpoint. read more

Redirecting to files

out "message" |> truncate-file.txt
out "message" >> append-file.txt

Type Conversion

Aside from annotating variables upon definition, you can also transform data along the pipeline.

Cast

Casting doesn’t alter the data, it simply changes the meta-information about how that data should be read.

out [1,2,3] | cast json | foreach { ... }

There is also a little syntactic sugar to do the same:

out [1,2,3] | :json: foreach { ... }

Format

format takes the source data and reformats it into another data format:

» out [1,2,3] | :json: format yaml
- 1
- 2
- 3

Sub-Shells

There are two types of emendable sub-shells: strings and arrays.

Examples:

touch ${ %[1,2,3] } # creates a file named '[1,2,3]'
touch @{ %[1,2,3] } # creates three files, named '1', '2' and '3'

The reason murex breaks from the POSIX tradition of using backticks and parentheses is because murex works on the principle that everything inside a curly bracket is considered a new block of code.

Filesystem Wildcards (Globbing)

While glob expansion is supported in the interactive shell, there isn’t auto-expansion of globbing in shell scripts. This is to protect against accidental damage. Instead globbing is achieved via sub-shells using either:

Examples:

All text files via globbing:

g *.txt

All text and markdown files via regexp:

rx '\.(txt|md)$'

All directories via type matching:

f +d

You can also chain them together, eg all directories named *.txt:

g *.txt | f +d

To use them in a shell script it could look something a like this:

rm @{g *.txt | f +s}

(this deletes any symlinks called *.txt)

Brace expansion

In bash you can expand lists using the following syntax: a{1..5}b. In murex, like with globbing, brace expansion is a function: a: a[1..5]b and supports a much wider range of lists that can be expanded. (read more)

Executables

Aliases

You can create “aliases” to common commands to save you a few keystrokes. For example:

alias gc=git commit

alias behaves slightly differently to Bash. (read more)

Public Functions

You can create custom functions in murex using function. (read more)

function gc (message: str) {
    # shorthand for `git commit`
    
    git commit -m $message
}

Private Functions

private functions are like public functions except they are only available within their own modules namespace. (read more)

External Executables

External executables (including any programs located in $PATH) are invoked via the exec builtin (read more) however if a command isn’t an expression, alias, function nor builtin, then murex assumes it is an external executable and automatically invokes exec.

For example the two following statements are the same:

  1. exec uname
  2. uname

Thus for normal day to day usage, you shouldn’t need to include exec.

Control Structures

Using if Statements

if can be used in a number of different ways, the most common being:

if { true } then {
    # do something
} else {
    # do something else
}

if supports a flexible variety of incarnation to solve different problems. (read more)

Using switch Statements

Because if ... else if chains are ugly, murex supports switch statements:

switch $USER {
    case "Tom"   { out: "Hello Tom" }
    case "Dick"  { out: "Howdie Richard" }
    case "Sally" { out: "Nice to meet you" }

    default {
        out: "I don't know who you are"
    }
}

switch supports a flexible variety of different usages to solve different problems. (read more)

Using foreach Loops

foreach allows you to easily iterate through an array or list of any type: (read more)

%[ apples bananas oranges ] | foreach fruit { out "I like $fruit" }

Using formap Loops

formap loops are the equivalent of foreach but against map objects: (read more)

%{
    Bob:     {age: 10},
    Richard: {age: 20},
    Sally:   {age: 30}
} | formap name person {
    out "$name is $person[age] years old"
}

Stopping Execution

The continue Statement

continue will terminate execution of an inner block in iteration loops like foreach and formap. Thus continuing the loop from the next iteration:

%[1..10] | foreach i {
    if { $i == 5 } then {
        continue foreach
        # ^ jump back to the next iteration
    }

    out $i
}

continue requires a parameter to define while block to iterate on. This means you can use continue within nested loops and still have readable code. (read more)

The break Statement

break will terminate execution of a block (eg function, private, if, foreach, etc):

%[1..10] | foreach i {
    if { $i == 5 } then {
        break foreach
        # ^ exit foreach
    }

    out $i
}

break requires a parameter to define while block to end. Thus break can be considered to exhibit the behavior of return as well as break in other languages:

function example {
    if { $USER == "root" } then {
        err "Don't run this as root"
        break example
    }

    # ... do something ...
}

break cannot exit anything above it’s callers scope. (read more)

The exit Statement

Terminates murex. exit is not scope aware; if it is included in a function then the whole shell will still exist and not just that function. (read more)

Signal: SIGINT

This can be invoked by pressing Ctrl + c.

Signal: SIGQUIT

This can be invoked by pressing Ctrl + \

Sending SIGQUIT will terminate all running functions in the current murex session. Which is a handy escape hatch if your shell code starts misbehaving.

Signal: SIGTSTP

This can be invoked by pressing Ctrl + z

This site's content is rebuilt automatically from murex's source code after each merge to the master branch. Downloadable murex binaries are also built with the website.

Last built on Mon Feb 13 09:18:06 UTC 2023 against commit f339958f33995895c1d997efcdbb8408d2c8d45f8b5f934.

Current version is which has been verified against 13950 tests cases.