With XSH2, it is possible to browse a document tree (XML data represented as a DOM-tree) as if it was a local filesystem, except that XPath expressions are used instead of ordinary directory paths.

To mimic the filesystem navigation as closely as possible, XSH2 contains several commands named by analogy of UNIX filesystem commands, such as cd, ls and pwd.

The current position in the document tree is called the current node. Current node's XPath may be queried with pwd command. In the interactive shell, current node is also displayed in the command line prompt. (Since there may be multiple document trees open at the same time, XSH2 tries to locate a variable holding the current document and use it to fully qualify current node's XPath in the XSH2 prompt.) Remember, that beside cd command, current node (and document) is also silently changed by open command, create command and temporarily also by the node-list variant of the foreach loop without a loop variable.

XPath expressions are always evaluated in context of the current node. Different documents can be accessed through variables: $doc/foo[1]/bar.

$scratch:/> $docA := open "testA.xml"
$docA/> $docB := open "testB.xml"
$docB/> pwd
/
$docB/> cd $docA/article/chapter[title='Conclusion']
$docA/article/chapter[5]> pwd
/article/chapter[5]
$docA/article/chapter[5]> cd previous-sibling::chapter
$docA/article/chapter[4]> cd ..
$docA/article> cd $docB
$docB:/> ls
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<article>...</article>