OSH versus Oil

Here is a short guide:

• bin/osh runs the OSH language, which is extremely compatible with POSIX shell and bash. It's designed to run existing scripts.
• bin/oil runs the Oil language, a new shell language that's designed to be familiar to Python and JavaScript users. You can gracefully upgrade your shell scripts to it, or write brand new scripts in it.
  • See A Tour of the Oil Language

But they actually run in the same binary and use the same parser and interpreter! bin/osh and bin/oil are symlinks.

There are many global shell options like shopt --set parse_brace that change OSH into Oil. Running bin/oil is equivalent to running bin/osh with the option group shopt --set oil:all.

(As of 11/2021, OSH is a lot more mature than Oil.)

Examples

For examples of the syntax, see The Simplest Explanation of Oil.