About this collection
About the reliquary
Who collects, how the site is put together, and where the sister collection lives.
The Shell Reliquary is the second stickybit collection made of lots of little pages. The first, the HTML Herbarium, presses markup elements; this one keeps the symbols of the shell's history expansion — relics in the strict sense: small, old, carried from session to session, rarely seen.
The 26 relics were collected from the article Your shell and the lazy exclamation mark and checked against the GNU Bash manual, which is the source pointed to on each label. The rarity classification is the curators' opinion.
Everything here is generated by gen_relicario.py, a Python script a few hundred lines long, in the same spirit as Jim Nielsen's Lots of Little HTML Pages: every state is a page, every page is a file, and not a byte of JavaScript is served.