Preface from the Author

Thank you for purchasing and using Hamilton C shell.

Hamilton C shell is a command shell and utilities package for Windows similar to that found on UNIX or Linux systems. The zillions of popular utilities -- grep, fgrep, head, tail, diff, sed, cron, tar, mv, cp, rm, su, etc. -- provide the vocabulary. The shell itself ties it together with a powerful interactive scripting language and an elegant user interface. The language grammar includes a complete set of control structures (if, switch, for, foreach, repeat, while, proc), block-structured local variables, floating point, wildcarding and more.

Hamilton C shell began life in September, 1987 when I quit my job and set up shop in my living room, soon after the birth of my first child. I'd loved both operating systems and language processors (and this combined both!), PC's were about to get the big-OS capabilities I liked working with, I'd always wanted to be an entrepreneur and I wanted to be home with my kids. Fifteen months and 35,000 lines of code later, Hamilton C shell became the first multi-threaded application to ship for OS/2. In July 1992, it became the very first third party application to ship on NT. These days, it's about 160,000 lines.

This latest release has been completely refreshed for Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 offering, for the first time, automatic install and uninstall using the standard Microsoft installer and full electronic documentation.

I hope you enjoy my work.

Nicole Hamilton
Redmond, Washington, September 20, 2003
(First written at Wayland, Massachusetts, December 9, 1988)