Finally, a real executable that runs at /usr/bin/girl!

Join us for project discussion on irc.freenode.net in channel #girl if you get a chance! Keep it clean; we run a kid-safe channel.

Have you ever, perhaps upon viewing the tee-shirt or visiting the popular blog (both the tee-shirt and the blog are unrelated to this project), wished that there were an actual executable file named "girl" residing in your /usr/bin folder? Well, you just found it. =) And yes, it actually serves a purpose! Hopefully it will serve that purpose for you with a tasteful, yet playful, tip-of-the-hat to the humor intended by the the original concept.

Just, please, don't use the expression "executing girl" when you use it. That sounds positively brutal. Look for a girl-geek appreciation section in the Wiki to coincide with the initial source upload, including history of and links to women in computing.

View the source for the latest. Many more notes in the comments as well.

2008.11.11 Update - We have decided what to do for the /usr/bin/girl executable in the long-term, and it's really exciting. /usr/bin/girl can do ANYTHING! It will be used as the first line in a shell script's shebang, e.g. #!/usr/bin/girl, which will use an "intuition" parsing engine to handle choosing an interpreter and giving it the properly formatted args to run. For example, in Erlang a shell script would look something like this: erl -noshell -s hello hello_world -s init stop, which is very complicated! A Java command would look like java hello_world, which isn't as complicated, but still requires more typing than most users want to add to their daily workflow. The Girl interpreter will know those variations, and handle them with ease. This approach to functionality for the /usr/bin/girl executable not only gives true purpose and usefulness to the file, but fundamentally supports the primary mission of this project - to let girls everywhere know that they are just as welcome in technology as guys; girls can do anything, and do it with intuition! ;]

Note

Not to be confused with CSBot, an IRC game bot available here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/girl/ ( Many thanks to the CSBot team for allowing the simultaneous use of the "girl" project name at both their source forge site for CSBot and this Google Code site for /usr/bin/girl )