Sqsh (pronounced skwish) is short for SQshelL (pronounced s-q-shell), it is intended as a replacement for the venerable 'isql' program supplied by Sybase. It came about due to years of frustration of trying to do real work with a program that was never meant to perform real work.

Sqsh is much more than a nice prompt, it is intended to provide much of the functionality provided by a good shell, such as variables, redirection, pipes, back-grounding, job control, history, command completion, and dynamic configuration. Also, as a by-product of the design, it is remarkably easy to extend and add functionality.

Sqsh was designed with portability in mind and has been successfully compiled on most major UNIX platforms supported by Sybase, such as Linux, FreeBSD, HP-UX, AIX, IRIX, SunOS, Solaris, Dynix, OSF/1, DEC Unix, SCO, NeXT, DG/UX and CP/M (just kidding). It should build relatively easily on most POSIX and X/OPEN compliant systems. Sqsh has also been ported to Windows NT/95 using the Cygnus/Red Hat cygwin porting toolkit.