shell

shell

Module

shell

Module summary

The Erlang Shell

Description

The module shell implements an Erlang shell.

The shell is a user interface program for entering expression sequences. The expressions are evaluated and a value is returned. A history mechanism saves previous commands and their values, which can then be incorporated in later commands. How many commands and results to save can be determined by the user, either interactively, by calling shell:history/1 and shell:results/1, or by setting the application configuration parameters shell_history_length and shell_saved_results for the application STDLIB.

The shell uses a helper process for evaluating commands in order to protect the history mechanism from exceptions. By default the evaluato