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.