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.
  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. nickdothutton

    In some ways rather subversive! I like it. Not sure I'll get use out of it though.

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2026-11-09