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Does the title intrigue? It should. R is an abbreviation from Request or rather R(equest). This tiny utility was written by Guido Mersmann, the creator of the Amiga version of Boulder Däsh. The author says that his program is "the fiercest enemy of templates". According to me, he is right.
I am sure that many times you have met with this problem: you're beavering away in your shell issuing some complex command when you are stumped because you have entered too few options or arguments. Instead of the command smoothly executing you get a string of barely intelligible language along these lines:
"COMMAND,OPT/K,ALL/S,DIRS/S,FILES/S,INTER/S:"
You've just provoked a template. This is no big problem, when the command is not complicated. But what if the template consists of ten or even more options? Do you have the mental power to analyze all of them one by one and enter a kilometre-long command? Those who are command-liners from way back and those with the ability of not giving up easily can do that but all those lazy Amigans who want speed and ease of use in their work should use R(equest).
The main aim of the utility is to generate a GUI for every shell command which does not have one. R does it by turning templates into a readable and easy to understand interface that consists of gadgets, requesters and switches.
The only thing you have to do is to enter in the shell the R command (default is simple R) with the argument. The argument is the access path to the command for which we would like to have a GUI. For example, entering
R: C:Copy
will produce a simple, nice looking GUI in which you can specify the names of files to copy and their destination path. Using switches you can add options like: ALL, QUIET. It is easy and nice and has the same effect as typing it all in the shell. Nevertheless for some of you it may sound little ridiculous because you still have to open a Shell Window and enter some text in it. The difference is that we have to enter just one simple line instead of all the horrible arguments and parameters.
The utility seems not to have any bad side or make big mistakes. Sometimes you may encounter commands that R can not generate a GUI for. The one to blame is the creator of that command (not R), because R can generate GUIs only for commands that conform with the original Commodore templates. Nevertheless do not worry, because there are not many commands which have some specific, other than Commodore, templates.
The utility requires not much: OS2.0. That is it. It is Smurfware. If you like this program, and use it, you should send a Smurf figure to its author. The newest version is 1.57 and can be downloaded from Aminet (util/cli/r.lha)
Sebastian "Mailman" Rosa (sebastian.rosa@wp.pl)
