OSO Certification Program

The Open Shell Organization (OSO) provides a formal certification for command line utilities.

Why Certify?

Certified tools earn the trust of system administrators and automation engineers by guaranteeing predictable behavior and safe execution patterns.

The Certification Mark

Upon certification, the command line app is allowed (and encouraged) to display the certification on the first line of help and error output (TTY).

Required text

{OSO} Certified - opensh.org

The URL answers who certified the tool. Do not use a DevCentr subdomain in the mark.

Truecolor (TTY)

Use 24-bit \x1b[38;2;R;G;Bm sequences (shared helper: project_map.badge / OSO constants):

| Segment | Hex | |---|---| | { } and - | #9CA3AF | | first O | #D1D5DB | | S | #B85C5C | | second O | #5A9BB0 | | Certified | #7DCEA0 (mint) | | opensh.org | #3B6EA5 (cobalt) |

Emit plain ASCII when piped, --json, or NO_COLOR is set. Bold (\x1b[1m) is optional and not locked.

Optional second TTY line

Product-specific hint (what the tool is / is not). Omit when piped or JSON.

Discoverability

Certified CLIs on Unix-like hosts must ship:

  1. --help

  2. A man page (preferred), and ideally an info node

--help alone is not enough. Some system ls installs ship neither man nor info — that fails this contract and is motivation for a higher bar, not a model to copy.

Domain

Public home: opensh.org (owned). Wire DNS to GitHub Pages (or another docs host). openshell.org may be acquired later as a redirect.