A game to learn (or teach) how to use standard commands in a Unix shell.

Teaching first-year university students or high schoolers to use a Unix shell is not always the easiest or most entertaining of tasks. GameShell was devised as a tool to help students at the Université Savoie Mont Blanc to engage with a real shell, in a way that encourages learning while also having fun. The original idea, due to Rodolphe Lepigre, was to run a standard bash session with an appropriate configuration file that defined "missions" which would be "checked" in order to progress through the game.

Available in English, French and Italian.

GameShell should work on any standard Linux system, and also on macOS and BSD (but we have run fewer tests on the latter systems). On Debian or Ubuntu, the only dependencies (besides bash) are the gettext-base and awk packages (the latter is generally installed by default). Some missions have additional dependencies: these missions will be skipped if the dependencies are not met.

In the AUR.