libdash is a fork of the Linux Kernel's dash shell that builds a linkable library with extra exposed interfaces. The primary use of libdash is to parse shell scripts, but it could be used for more.
The C code for dash should build on a wide variety of systems. The library may not build on platforms with esoteric linkers; it's been tested on OS X.
The OCaml code relies on ctypes-0.11.5 and ctypes-foreign; everything else should be in base.
You should be able to simply run docker build -t libdash . to get a runnable environment. Everything will be in /home/opam/libdash.
Broadly: crib from the Dockerfile. More concretely, in the root directory run:
./autogen.sh && ./configure && make && sudo make install
This should construct an executable src/dash and a static library src/libdash.a. They will need to be installed globally for things to work well.
Then run:
cd ocaml; make && make install
This will build the OCaml library and install it in your OPAM repository. There are tests in another directory; they will only build when libdash is actually installed.
cd test; make test
The tests use ocaml/round_trip.sh to ensure that every tester file in ocaml/tests round-trips correctly through parsing and pretty printing.
The ideal interface to use is parsecmd_safe in parser.c. Parsing the POSIX shell is a complicated affair: beyond the usual locale issues, aliases affect the lexer, so one must use setalias and unalias to manage any aliases that ought to exist.
The general AST is described in nodes.h. There are some tricky invariants around the precise formatting of control codes; the OCaml code shows some examples of working with the args fields in ocaml/ast.ml, which converts the C AST to an OCaml AST.