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What programs should be listed? I'm using "biggest" in the sense of substantial, not necessarily the raw number of lines.

• Hand-written shell scripts. There are many big autoconf-generated scripts, like the 70K-line coreutils script, but I don't consider them substantial in this sense.
• Shell programs that use data structures and algorithms.
  • As a counterexample, bash-completion is pretty sophisticated, but it's also repetitive because it has a relatively simple function for every command on a Unix machine.
• Shell programs that are over 5K lines (though there may be exceptions). The biggest shell programs that aren't repetitive tend to be in the 10K+ line range. I haven't seen any programs over 100K lines.

The List

• akinomyoga/ble.sh -- 87K lines (63K LoC w/o comments) in total. Bash Line Editor---fish-like interactive line editor in pure bash! The main file out/ble.sh has 39K lines (29K LoC), but there are 80K+ lines including module files in total. There are many comments (in Japanese).
  • How Interactive Shells Work has a nice overview of how ble.sh works. It's very sophisticated, using bind -x to read raw bytes from the terminal, decoding those itself in multiple explicit state machines, maintaining a drawing buffer, updating the buffer, etc. It has timing and "fibers", etc.
  • This comment on issue 663 has details on the shell parser! I think this is one of the most sophisticated uses of data structures in shell I've seen.
  • We are trying to run ble.sh under OSH. It mostly parses.
  • First commit in 2015 with 8K lines / 6K loc. The actual development has started in 2013.
• kalua - OpenWRT addon ~56K SLoC/lines of POSIX shell
• bashdb, the bash debugger. ~14K lines of bash. Interesting history: Implementing Debuggers
• drwetter/testssl.sh -- 21K lines of bash in a single file! Appears to be hand-written. History: Back in 2006 it started with a few openssl commands.... (Hit issue #606 parsing it.)
• Simplenetes: Kubernetes in 17K lines of Shell. Amazing! But seems dormant. Hacker News Thread.
  • Related to my bold claim here
• rkhunter (official site) -- 21K lines of Bourne shell written from 2003-2018!
• romkatv/powerlevel10k -- 12K lines of zsh scripts in the directory internal/. There are other 8K lines of configs and helper scripts. First commit in 2014.
• dylanaraps/neofetch -- 10K lines of bash 3.2. Displays system information. May also do something interesting with images (?)
  • first commit 2015
• xwmx/nb -- 26K lines (22K LoC) of bash in nb itself. An additional 91K lines (61K LoC) if we count bats tests as bash.
  • First commit in 2014, but active commit history starts in early 2016.
• distrobox -- over 7k lines of bash script. Use any linux distribution inside your terminal.
• acme.sh -- 8K lines of shell script. Issues and renews certificates.
• inxi 2.3.56 [obsolete] -- 16K lines of bash. A fork of infobash in 2008 (889 lines then). infobash has started in 2005. From v2.9, inxi is replaced by the Perl implementation.
• bashforth -- At ~3800 lines this isn't huge, but it apparently implements a real programming language. It has a lot of whitespace and comments.
• yoda -- While only about half the size of the above bashforth, this again is an implementation of a whole interpreter and compiler, while being considerably more feature-packed. Same author, but a 20 years younger implementation. Comment: "What learned you have, unlearn you must!"
• vegardit/bash-funk -- 27K lines (24K LoC) in total. A Bash library. The first commit in May, 2017 (with 10K lines / 8K LoC).
• Relax-and-Recover -- 35K lines (24K LoC). Backup and restoration tool. First git commit March, 2009 (with 4K lines / 3K LoC)
• abcde / A Better CD Encoder, used for ripping CDs, weighs in at around 5.5k LoC.
• thc-segfault -- 3.3K LoC. A pubnix server built mostly using Bash
• ffmpeg/configure - 8.4K LoC. FFmpeg's configure script is hand-written
• ffhevc -- 4k LoC. Fully hand-written Bash wrapper script for encoding to HEVC video using FFmpeg and libx265.
• ffx264 -- 3.9k LoC. Fully hand-written Bash wrapper script for encoding to H.264/AVC video using FFmpeg and libx264.
• h264enc -- 9.2k LoC. Fully hand-written Bash wrapper script for MEncoder for encoding to H.264/AVC video.
• bashtop -- 5.3k LoC. A resource monitor
• halcyon -- 6.6k LoC. A system for installing Haskell apps; hand-written with careful attention to bash semantics and error-checking, in a peculiar style inspired by functional programming.
• winetricks -- 22K lines of shell script. Installs various Windows programs under Wine
• wordshell -- ~7k lines of code. Manages multiple WordPress sites from the command-line.
• BaCon -- ~10k lines of code. Converts programs written in BASIC to C. There are two implementations - one written in BASIC and one as a shell script.
• FireHOL -- 9k lines of code for the main script, another 3k for the FireQOS tool. FireHOL is a language (and a program to run it) which builds secure, stateful firewalls from easy to understand, human-readable configurations.
• gxadmin -- 11kLOC is a collection of templated SQL queries and data processing utilities for managing a scientific workflow engine (Galaxy).
• mulle-bashfunctions -- ~6K lines of code. A function library for bash/zsh programs. Used in mulle-sde a command line IDE, which is another 100K lines of shell scripts (https://github.com/mulle-sde)
• x11docker -- 11.6k lines of code. Run GUI applications in docker or podman containers.

Shell-Like Languages / DSLs

• modernish is a portable shell dialect written in shell
• bats is a DSL for writing tests. Generates bash code.
• bashible is an Ansible-like DSL in bash. comments
• clash is an object oriented framework compatible with any modern POSIX shell.
• bash Infinity is a standard library and a boilerplate framework for bash.

Smaller Programs

• Alpine, Aboriginal, Debian scripts -- see blog post
• Completion scripts are big, but often repetitive.
  • _git Zsh completion -- 8.3k lines of code
  • git-completion.bash
  • Docker completion
• dyne/Tomb is a ~3500 line zsh script.
• Basalt -- a full-featured package manager in pure Bash (est. ~2021). Although it's only a few thousand lines, there's already a rich ecosystem (15+ apps/libs) that includes many thousand more lines. Some Bash libraries include (at various stages of development):
  • bash-core, a library for enhancing the trap and shopt builtins, adding stacktraces, and many essential amenities
  • bash-object, a library for constructing arbitrarily nested data structures in pure Bash (nearly 200 tests)
  • bash-json, a library for parsing and printing JSON in pure Bash
• tablespoon/fun/cli-clock - a clock with multiline characters written in bash.
• json.bash / jb — a command-line tool and bash library that creates JSON (~1700 lines, plus ~3000 lines of tests).

Links

• OSH "Wild" Tests parse over a million lines of shell. However most of these are small programs and distro package definitions like Alpine PKGBUILD and Gentoo ebuilds, which are repetitive.

• Shell Programs That Run Under OSH

• shell script are dangerous The shell is a program to handle your system internally via an interactive console(or not)... It's feature full and extremely dangerous. it's not done to produce applications.