rc is a ~99% identical port of the Plan 9 rc(1) shell. Reverse-engineered directly from the original C source and man page, it reconstructs the exact AST semantics. We even resurrected undocumented quirks like -V and obscure list-flattening.

A memory-safe, cross-platform 2MB static binary.

• Native interactive line editing and command history without rlwrap
• Unix native support for Linux, macOS, and BSDs spanning 30+ architectures
• Single statically compiled binary with a low memory footprint
• A best-effort Unix implementation of rfork behavior
• AST-based interpreter providing fast and predictable execution
• Native concurrency mapping & background tasks directly to goroutines
• Core Plan 9 mechanics like closures, list flattening, and caret concatenation
• Interactive startup parses ~/.rcrc for convenient local configurations
• AST parser natively evaluates heredocs inside functions
• Process substitution uses os.Pipe circumventing /dev/fd restrictions
• The ~ operator mutates $status
• Globbing matches single strings instead of lists

• CGO. Pure static binaries only. iOS/legacy Android dropped due to C linkage.
• Plan 9 support. You already have the real rc, use it.
• Windows support. If you want a Plan 9 shell on Windows, you are in the wrong place.
• POSIX compliance overhead. Standard shells already do this.
• The export keyword. Variables are just variables.
• Implicit string splitting. A list is always treated as a list.
• Heavy plugin ecosystems.
• Job control. Commands like fg or bg belong in a terminal multiplexer.
• Programmable auto-completion. We parse commands, not your mind.
• Shell arithmetic. Math belongs in dedicated tools like expr or bc.
• Cryptic parameter expansion modifiers. Write explicit code instead of relying on arcane syntax.
• Command aliasing. Standard functions handle this better.

You don't need rlwrap. The shell implements its own raw TTY reader with standard bindings.

Requires Go 1.26+.

env CGO_ENABLED=0 go install -trimpath -ldflags="-s -w" github.com/enzv/rc@latest

Read the original Plan 9 rc manual. It works exactly like that.

This shell builds itself. We don't use make. We use make.rc.

It is an rc script that lints, cross-compiles, and orchestrates the test suite. When the plan9port reference image is available, the tests compare this port against plan9port's rc fixture-by-fixture, except for OS-specific rfork cases covered by local contract tests.

Bootstrap the build system using the Go toolchain:

go run . make.rc build
go run . make.rc test
go run . make.rc all