Hey man, thanks a heap for your merge request!
As you've probably noticed, this project is pretty much dead and unmaintained - I haven't even looked at it for nearly a year, let alone actually done some much-needed work on fixing it up to work properly.
For your first commit (correcting the read function), thanks for catching that - from what I can tell, that bug came around when working on basic-web (for whatever reason it requires the last two characters to be removed, but I can't remember why - probably something in the convoluted mess that is IOInterface). I'd be happy to merge that commit in.

For the SHELL command, the purpose of this project was to create a toy interpreter for the BASIC flavour found in the 'Basic!' iOS app, which I was playing around with at the time - the end goal of the project was to have an interpreter that could run (nearly) all projects created in that app.
While node-basic does have a few little extra things, adding an entirely new BASIC command is definitely out of the scope of this project (nevertheless one that provides access to the shell, which doesn't even really exist in iOS).

For these reasons, I can't really merge the SHELL command (but as I said, I would be completely happy to merge the other commit - I believe I will need you to create a new pull request with only that commit for me to do this, however). If you are interested in maintaining this project, you are of course free to do whatever you want with your own fork, and if you want I can add a link to the README of this project to your maintained fork.