Something like 2-3 years ago, I started a small project with my friends called CShare.

From the site you can read:

cshare (from console share) lets you share any directory through a HTTP server. it’s simply to use (just launch it from the terminal), fast (multi-threaded POSIX), personalizable (XSLT themes), and client plataform independent (you just need a browser).

We started the project because we wanted to write some elegant code with a modern C style, and do some experimentations on bleeding performance under the Linux environment.

Although we wrote tons of code (it’s still available on the SVN repository), the application never saw the light of the day, mainly because we felt a lack of motivation due to the slow development speed with C.

So we’ve completely abandon the project. I’ve also tried 2 or 3 times to completely remove the project from SourceForge with no success: the process is beyond bureaucratic…

However, the reason I’m writing this post is because I found today a simple way of getting the same functionality of CShare, with a single line of Python:

python -c "import SimpleHTTPServer;SimpleHTTPServer.test()" 

Even tough you will not get the same performance and concurrent access like CShare would (eventually) deliver, it’s simply enough to sit at your .bashrc, and it really gets the job done!