Scsh has a high-level process notation for doing shell-script like tasks: running programs, establishing pipelines and i/o redirection. scsh embeds this process notation within a full implementation of scheme, a minimal and clean dialect of the lisp programming language. the process notation is realized as a set of macro definitions, and is carefully designed to allow full integration with standard scheme code. scsh isn't scheme-like; it is scheme.

at the scripting level, scsh also has an awk design, also implemented as a macro that can be embedded inside general scheme code.

scsh additionally provides the low-level access to the operating system normally associated with c. the current release provides full access to posix, plus important non-posix extensions, such as complete sockets support. "full access to posix" means: fork, exec & wait, sockets, full read, write, open & close, seek & tell, complete file-system access, including stat, chmod/chgrp/chown, symlink, fifo & directory access, tty & pty support, file locking, pipes, select, file-name pattern-matching, time & date, environment variables, signal handlers, and more.