Pigshell Brings a Unix Shell to the Web via 9p
Pigshell: Unix the Web
Pigshell, a 2015 project, puts a Unix-style shell on the web with 9p file access. Commenters praise the "9p life" and imagine apps and systems that interoperate through small, fine-grained files, letting programs and now LLMs inspect and alter state. The catch: talking to all those files means many kernel syscalls, which historically has not been performant.
9p feels like it is rallying around a core truth that's there all the time, just more of it, more files.
- alt227
My Chrome flags this site as not secure, but it doesnt tell me why which is strange.
EDIT: Looking at it, chrome seems to hide all security info about sites now and only display a generic 'Not Secure' badge for anything. This is a very awkward change and removes lots of convenience when troubleshooting random sites.
Still, the site needs to fix its SSL certificate.
- somat
The web(html) is a hierarchical system and as such it's proper place in the world is mapped to the filesystem.
Which is honestly what I thought plan9's webfs https://man.cat-v.org/plan_9/4/webfs did and then you could use the filesystem api to parse it. But alas, I actually read the man page to double check, and it looks like it does the much more sane option and just fetches web resources(http), I am crushed.
But it may be a fun weekend project to see if that mapping could be done and where it fails. So not a complete loss.
- nickdothutton
In some ways rather subversive! I like it. Not sure I'll get use out of it though.