For anybody who's wondering why I chose to post this: I found this while Googling around trying to answer the question "how hard is it to write a custom shell, and how would you get started?" The reason I wanted to know that is this: I've always been intrigued by the idea of making "things" ( hand-waving around the details of what that means) available via ssh. Imagine something like a MUD, except not a MUD exactly. Just the idea of "You login to a server and you're immediately dropped into some program that provides $EXPERIENCE."

For the longest time I thought the "way to do that" probably involved some crazy sshd config or something, but then the penny dropped and I realized "Well shit, you could just make it a shell and set the user's shell entry to that program. Duh."

If somebody knows a better approach to that sort of thing, I'd love to hear about it. But for now I'm content that I've found an approach that seems workable.

(and if you're wondering more: No, this isn't anything interesting, or a startup project, or anything you'd probably even see on Show HN. It's just an example of the kind of random crap I think about in between doing other things.)