I asked ChatGPT and another AI to generate qbsh scripts and even gave it commands like CALC and PIP to incorporate. It clearly had bash in the crunchbang. When I suggested it wasn't qbsh, it apologized, removed that line and told me it was more using correct syntax and not "bash built-ins" and hallucinated qbsh commands that don't exist like GREP. It was pretty hilarious.
Close to none of this is true whatsoever. It was partly inspired by #Commodore64, but also by CP/M. And while #qbsh does support basic scripting, it is very much not BASIC compatible with any retro BASIC platform.
qbsh won't teach you to program in #BASIC by using it, even though it is #opensource and written in QBASIC, but to that end, qbsh won't teach you how to code in BASIC any more than #bash will teach you to code in C.
A minor update to #qbsh is in the works. I'm adding the ability to run qbsh scripts from the interactive shell and to chain further scripts from within a script, without having to set the #! and +x bit first.
Some lucky soul just might get one of these very, very limited edition bad-label #qbsh floppies, which will no doubt be worth more than the regular label floppies on ebay at some future point.
I'm going to bring some of these with me to #SCaLE this week. If you're running a current #Fedora on a machine with a floppy drive, come find me and I just might let you have one of them.
I have to admit that the experience of managing the file systems on these early 1990s floppy disks could be a little better out of box on #Fedora#Linux. For one, it attempts to read ext4 then iso9660 before doing FAT32/16/12. And Gnome Disks gives all sorts of weird behavior. It's almost like testing priorities have moved away from 1.44MB floppies in recent years.
I'm pleased to announce that #qbsh has a new release! Version 1.1.0 is out with significant improvements in the shell pipe handling for interactive CLI programs like vim.
@r3vilo That was also true for CP/M before DOS. The Osborne One came with a disk that had both CBASIC 2 and MBASIC (C64 had a subset of MBASIC they licensed from Microsoft).
DOS started as a CP/M clone, so it makes sense they copied most of the shell.
And if you want to relive a little of both, that's why I wrote #qbsh, which is loosely based on C64 and CP/M and written in QBASIC.
Part of me is tempted to use #UBlue to make a custom #Fedora#Silverblue image to add in the Pop_OS Gnome extensions, make #vim the default editor, and #Thunderbird the default mail reader and call it "Blue Bacon Linux"
TL;DR: You pass bincapz a program that runs on a UNIX flavor, and it'll try to tell you what it might try to do via dumb yet surprisingly effective static analysis.
Seriously thinking of what it might be like to have an immutable OS that just drops you into #qbsh. Like, go full on #Commodore64, #Atari, #Apple with it - boot a ROM that drops to a BASIC shell. Like, we take #Linux, and throw POSIX out the window, and include bash for the sake of compatibility and to offload IO that hasn't been natively implemented yet. Using something like #Fedora IoT for the base with automatic updates and using qsh scripts as much as possible for background operations.