Shellingham: Tool to Detect Surrounding Shell

1.5.4 · active · verified Sat Mar 28

Shellingham is a Python library designed to detect the current shell environment, aiding in tasks like shell completion. The latest version is 1.5.4, released on March 28, 2026. It is actively maintained with a release cadence of approximately one release every few months.

Warnings

breaking Version 1.5.0 introduced a breaking change in the detect_shell function's return type, which now returns a tuple instead of a single string.
Fix: Update your code to handle the tuple return type from detect_shell.
deprecated The 'get_shell' function is deprecated as of version 1.5.0 and will be removed in a future release.
Fix: Replace calls to 'get_shell' with 'detect_shell'.

Install

pip install shellingham Install Shellingham

Imports

detect_shell
```
from shellingham import detect_shell
```
Correct import path for the detect_shell function

Quickstart

Quickstart example to detect and print the current shell environment.

from shellingham import detect_shell

shell, path = detect_shell()
print(f"Detected shell: {shell}")

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