bash support

Powershell support is great, but millions of people know bash and other unix shells and will expect support for it to be “in the box”. Currently you can simulate it via this:

#!pwsh
bash -c "ls ~/.nuget/packages/libtorch-cpu/0.3.52118/runtimes/linux-x64/native"

I’d like this to just be

#!bash
ls ~/.nuget

If you can point me in the right direction I can attempt to add an extension that enables this, at least for Linux. We could also add support for bash on WSL, perhaps separately.

[jonsequitur]

! would be difficult as a reserved prefix for the same reason that we moved away from %, which is that it introduces ambiguities with the embedded languages. # and #! were already effectively comments in C#, F#, PowerShell, and several other languages.

That said, within .NET Interactive, #!-prefixed magic commands are user-extensible, including the custom command line syntax, so #!bash -c echo "hello" would be straightforward.

The default language for a notebook is mapped to the kernel name, which is why in Jupyter we install three different “kernels”. The difference between them is just the command line arguments to dotnet-interactive in the kernelspec, in effect:

> dotnet interactive jupyter --default-kernel fsharp /path/to/connectionfile

[TylerLeonhardt]

I can sympathize with wanting a magic command for running a command in the shell that’s available on the system.

@dsyme I’m sure your example is a bit of a simplification of something much larger… but ls is ls in PowerShell.

That is to say

#!pwsh
ls ~/.nuget/packages/libtorch-cpu/0.3.52118/runtimes/linux-x64/native

uses the actual ls executable. Any linux executable on the PATH is available in PowerShell.

But yeah a way to invoke one-off commands in whatever the default shell is would be nice.

The only thing we need to be careful is the feature creep because PowerShell support is more than just a shell/one off commands - you get plotting, and get/set variables from other languages, and other rich features of .NET Interactive.