FISH(1)

✨ NAME ✨

fish — the friendly interactive shell 🐟💅

(also, for the record, the manual name is fish-shell and this page is FISH(1) — there, header folded in, we move 🌸)

🌈 SYNOPSIS 🌈

fish [OPTIONS] [FILE [ARG ...]]
fish [OPTIONS] [-c COMMAND [ARG ...]]

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

okay so bestie, <rainbow>fish</rainbow> is a command-line shell that was written mainly with interactive use in mind, like it literally exists to be typed into by a human 🫶

this page is just the quick rundown of the options for invoking fish, ngl. the full manual is out there in HTML — you get it with the help command from inside fish — and it also lives in the fish-doc(1) man page. the tutorial is HTML too, via help tutorial, or you can hit man fish-tutorial 📚✨

the following options are available (all of them, no skips, we don't do that here 💅)

• -c, --command=COMMAND — evaluate the commands you hand it instead of reading from the commandline. any extra positional args become $argv 👯
• -C, --init-command=COMMANDS — evaluate these commands after it reads the config but before it runs whatever -c gave it, or before it reads interactive input. so like, your little pre-game ritual 🎬
• -d, --debug=DEBUG_CATEGORIES — turns on debug output and gives a pattern for matching debug categories. the Debugging section below has the tea ☕
• -o, --debug-output=DEBUG_FILE — names a file path that receives the debug output, including categories and fish_trace. default is standard error 📝
• -i, --interactive — the shell is interactive. that's it, that's the whole flag 💬
• -l, --login — act as if invoked as a login shell 🚪
• -N, --no-config — do not read configuration files. zero config, zero drama 🙈
• -n, --no-execute — don't execute anything, just do syntax checking. vibes only, no running 🔍
• -p, --profile=PROFILE_FILE — when fish exits, it outputs timing info on all the commands it executed to the file you name. this excludes time spent starting up and reading the configuration ⏱️
• --profile-startup=PROFILE_FILE — writes the timing for fish's startup to the specified file 🚀
• -P, --private — enables private mode: fish will not access old history or store new history 🤫🔥
• --print-rusage-self — when fish exits, output stats from getrusage 📊
• --print-debug-categories — print all the debug categories, then exit 👋
• -v, --version — print version and exit 🏷️
• -f, --features=FEATURES — enables one or more comma-separated feature flags 🧩

the fish exit status is generally the exit status of the last foreground command, iykyk ✅

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🐛 DEBUGGING 🐛

so fish gives you extensive support for debugging fish scripts, which slays — but you can also debug and instrument its internals, which is the main-character move 💅

you turn debugging on by passing the --debug option. for example, this command turns on debugging for background IO thread events, in addition to the default categories, i.e. debug, error, warning, and warning-path:

> fish --debug=iothread

the categories that are available get listed by fish --print-debug-categories. the --debug option accepts a comma-separated list of categories and it supports glob syntax, which is honestly so good ✨ the following command turns on debugging for complete, history, history-file, and profile-history, as well as the default categories:

> fish --debug='complete,*history*'

debug messages output to stderr by default. also note: if fish_trace is set, execution tracing also outputs to stderr by default. if you'd rather have it in a file, that's what the --debug-output option is for:

> fish --debug='complete,*history*' --debug-output=/tmp/fish.log --init-command='set fish_trace on'

🫶 real talk: these options can also be changed via the FISH_DEBUG and FISH_DEBUG_OUTPUT variables.

the categories enabled via --debug are added to the ones enabled by $FISH_DEBUG, so you can disable them by prefixing them with - — like, reader-*,-ast* enables reader debugging and disables ast debugging 🧠

and the file given in --debug-output takes precedence over the file in FISH_DEBUG_OUTPUT. periodt 👑

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🎀 EXAMPLES 🎀

to just start fish, iconic, no notes:

fish

to run a file with fish:

fish /path/to/script.fish

to run some commands with fish:

fish -c 'echo Hi there!'

you can also pass arguments to those commands 🫶

> fish -c 'printf %s\n $argv' "first line" "second line"
first line
second line

to run a script, except read this other file first:

fish --init-cmd "source otherfile" script.fish

to profile fish's startup and find out what takes the most time in your configuration — genuinely obsessed with this one:

fish --profile-startup /tmp/start.prof -ic exit
sort -nk2 /tmp/start.prof

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👑 Copyright 👑

fish-shell developers 🌸

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and that's the whole page bestie 💖 this was version 4.9, dated Sep 08, 2026 — go forth and shell, mwah 🎀🐟✨