SmartPrompt v1.0 Smart shell Prompt enhancement Documentation File September 26th, 1998 Copyright (C) 1998 by Adrian Zurek. All rights reserved. BORING LEGAL STUFF ================== SmartPrompt software and this documentation are written and copyrighted (C) 1998 by Adrian Zurek. This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; see the file COPYING. If not, write to the Free Software Foundation, 675 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA. There is no warranty, implied or whatever. You use this software at your own risk, no matter what purpose you put it to. You didn't pay for it, so don't expect magic. CONTACT ======= You may contact me via snail-mail: Adrian Zurek ul. Mieszczanska 5/55 93-322 Lodz Poland or via e-mail: adek@plukwa.pdi.net or eventually adek@rast.lodz.pdi.net If You are familiar with IRC then You can catch me (nick aDEk) on IRCNET on channels #amigapl (polish language), #seasons, #amigaexotic (English). HOW TO GET IT ============= You can get it from me of course (see above) or via anonymous FTP at: ftp://plukwa.pdi.net/PL-A-Net/util/shell BTW: from here You can get another program from me: AScreen (archives as_xx-xx.lha) or hopefully from Aminet/util/shell (but I wouldn't be so sure about that :)) INTRODUCTION ============ Do You use sometimes UNIX? If the answer is yes then You probably noticed that *IX shells are very well organized, and their prompts can be very easily changed to what You want by changing only environment variable $PROMPT. On AmigaOS it isn't so easy: You have to change it by running command "Prompt" with a suitable argument. That was good some years ago, but now this command is too old and have too many limits. And here comes SmartPrompt. It is better than a real prompt and has many features: - Multiuser and AmiTCP support; - conditional strings placed in prompt when current user is a root or not a root; - *IX path styles or Amiga conventional; - two types of displaying paths; - it isn't a hack! friendly for OS!; - it's small (hmmm... could be smaller though ;) and pure so can be made resident!; - it's free!; - written by me! (I know that is the best feature for You ;))) There are many more features but I want to keep You in curiosity... :) REQUIREMENTS ============ You need Kickstart 2.04 (V37), about 8kB free memory to run this proggy and some more for shell consoles and of course my AScreen (just kidding, but it would be very nice to use it ;)) You will also need a hard disk or a floppy disk drive with disks, monitor and a keyboard (I think that there won't be any problems with this but who knows... :)) And that's all! Ready to go... USING SmartPrompt ================= The first thing to do is to copy SmartPrompt to c: directory or somewhere else where You like it , make it readable and executable for everyone (on Multiuser) and set a "p" protection mode which means that it can be made resident. Of course inserting line "Resident C:SmartPrompt" is a definitely a good thing to do. The next important step is to insert a line "Prompt *`SmartPrompt*`" somewhere in Your shell-startup. This tells Prompt to execute it each time the shell displays a new prompt. Hmmm... before this line You should set a environment variable called $PROMPT - it can be a global or a local variable. In this variable will be a string which tells SmartPrompt how to display Your prompt. So insert a line something like this: set SPROMPT "%p{ap00}" Hmmm... Now it's a good time to explain You all format codes that SmartPrompt recognizes: %u - current userid (root, nobody etc.) works only on Multiuser or AmiTCP! on other systems it displays 'nobody'. %h - hostname - Your computer name. It gets this from variable named $hostname. %t - current time in format hh:mm:ss for example 12:23:55. %d - date in format dd-mmm-yy for example 26-Sep-98. %w - weekday, for example Thursday. %% - displays '%' character. %q - displays '"' character. %b - displays '{' character. %B - displays '}' character. %R{} - this is a conditional command. The string inside "{" "}" brackets will be inserted in prompt string if the current user is root. Without Multiuser and AmiTCP it simply displays nothing. %r{} - same as above but displays string if the current user isn't a root. Without Multiuser and AmiTCP it displays specified string. NOTE: in brackets can be all format codes except %R{} and %r{} to avoid recursion! %p{} - this tells SmartPrompt to display current path. In "{" "}" brackets are additional format codes: a - display current path in Amiga style e.g. "Work:tmp" - default. x - display current path in *IX style e.g. "/Work/tmp". d - replace volume names as "Work:" or "Ram Disk:" with device names "DH0:", "RAM:". Note that if this isn't specified SmartPrompt will still replace volume names that has a character inside it with device name, so "Ram Disk:" will be always replaced by "RAM:". pxx - format code "p" tells SmartPrompt how to display current path. The number after a "p" character is very important and HAS to be in two digits e.g. "02". Only xx last components of path will be displayed so if the path is "Work:my/gfx/tmp" and the number is "02" You will see only "gfx/tmp" string. If the number is greater than the total number of components in the path it will show everything. "00" means: always show everything. Pxx - second path style. The difference between above style and this is that now the "xx" number specifies max prompt length. If the original prompt length is greater than that You gave, it will be shortened to its abbreviation. Like above, number has to be in two digits. Example: a path like "Work:my/gfx/tmp/outcoming" will be shortened to "Work:///outcoming" if it exceeds the desired prompt length. As You can see here is a name of volume, one slash for each subdir and a full name of the last component. Please note that the last path component will be always displayed even if the resulting string is longer than Your limit. And that's all folks (really simple isn't it? :)) No, it isn't simple so I think now it's a good time for EXAMPLES ======== Lets say You want to have a *IX style prompt like this: "[adek@rast:0 archives]$ " it's very simple with SmartPrompt to do this! see: set SPROMPT "[%u@%h:$ascreen %p{xp01}]%R[#]%r{$} " hehe... can You still understand this? Note that "$ascreen" is the local variable from AScreen which consists actual window number. As You can see You may insert environment variables into its string. And here is a good time to tell You that now the main limit for this program that it cannot get an actual process number. Why? Because SmartPrompt is executed in a new process, so its number is different than the shell number. But it is still to be displayed: just insert "$process" string somewhere in Your $SPROMPT variable. Second example: You can make a prompt colored! Just look at this line: set SPROMPT "[%R{*E[32m}%u%R{*E[0m}@%h:$ascreen %p{xp01}]%R[#]%r{$} " it's very similar to the previous example but displays userid in red color (on my system it is red ;)). Of course "*E[32m" and "*E[0m" are the standard console codes. Ufff... Maybe it isn't enough for You to know everything but try it! Just insert various combinations of the format codes and see the results! NOTE: if You have Multiuser or/and AmiTCP installed, but its corresponding libraries (multiuser.library/usergroup.library) aren't started, than SmartPrompt won't know that they are installed! But this shouldn't be a problem for You because usually before a shell prompt displays You login to the system. TODO ==== Not many as this should be a very small, quick and handy program: - make him able to get a current process number; - support for recognizing and displaying homedirs and assigns; EPILOG ====== And at the end I'd like to thanks all the people who want to be with Amiga, for good and for the worst (It seems that now are the worst :(). And finally here are special, individual greetings: Robert "rEkiN" Redziak - encouraged me to do this and showed me similar programs. Matthias Bethke - for his PromptPath from which I got an idea for the second style path. all sEASONS members - for being great m8s and for much fun!