AmigaOS 3.1.4! [beta]

[idrougge]

Originally Posted by Olaf Barthel

This extends to the shell and its commands, which differ from the arguably more robust Unix design in many important points. For example, there is no well-defined shell language, the commands perform the wildcard expansion (...)

That is actually an improvement over the Unix way. Ever tried to run "unzip *.zip" in a Unix shell?

[Samurai_Crow]

Originally Posted by MrDBUG

Would it be possible to simply make a "new" shell and leave the old for compatibility ?
:-D

The Flow Editor under AmigaVision would have been a great replacement for shell and AREXX both if the rights hadn't been lost.

[Sim085]

What about ZShell? I discovered this when I installed BetterWB and has tab auto-completion.

Originally Posted by MrDBUG

Would it be possible to simply make a "new" shell and leave the old for compatibility ?
:-D

Originally Posted by Romanujan

there are gossips that Shell-Seg from 3.1.4 got tab autocompletion

[Samurai_Crow]

ZShell is written in Assembly and doesn't follow AmigaDOS syntax. Aush is more compatible but still needs work and is closed source shareware so I don't know what language it's written in.

[modrobert]

Originally Posted by idrougge

That is actually an improvement over the Unix way. Ever tried to run "unzip *.zip" in a Unix shell?

unzip '*.zip'

[Olaf Barthel]

Originally Posted by MrDBUG

Would it be possible to simply make a "new" shell and leave the old for compatibility ?
:-D

Sure, it has been done before.

Compatibility is the major issue, though. What the AmigaDOS shell does is not particularly complex. It's how the shell does what needs to be done that is more complex than it deserves, and there are side-effects of the implementation which will give you grief

[gulliver]

Since someone else has been spreading some spoilers in another place, I can do the same here without consequences.

BTW, you dont need to worry about images using chipram. If available, by default they will use fastmem first.

[Cammy]

I like the inclusion of MagicWB colours in the icon preferences. It would be even better if Workbench had a good standard, default 16 colour palette though...

[Daedalus]

Ooh, it's like a lo-fi version of the 3.9 prefs Excellent that that functionality is coming back to 3.1 though!

[kolla]

Are the prefs file formats openly described? I still think it would be better if IPrefs could speak ARexx and perform prefs changes via ARexx instead of just monitoring env:, but if one at least could have a generic non-gui prefs editor, that would help too.

[ExiE]

Originally Posted by kolla

I still think it would be better if IPrefs could speak ARexx and perform prefs changes via ARexx

What a crazy idea.
XML based prefs format would be nice though.

[kolla]

What is more tricky...?
- Making sure Ghostbuster hack keeps working with newer workbench.library.
- Making Ghostbuster hack redundant by implementing "visible if valid" already.

[kolla]

Originally Posted by ExiE

What a crazy idea.
XML based prefs format would be nice though.

I would prefer yaml myself, xml parsing is rather memory consuming (for every tag, keep reading till closing tag to be sure xml is valid, what if there is no closing tag, or you run out of ram before you reach it?)

[Minuous]

Originally Posted by kolla

Are the prefs file formats openly described?

Yes, they are IFF PREF files and, although strictly speaking they are considered private, structure definitions for the chunks are in the various system include files.

@eXie:

I think redoing everything as XML would be lots of work to end up with something less efficient than what we already have.

[haynor666]

I was never user of 3.5 or 3.9 mainly because I use my amigas these days only for games. Interesting that some people are trying to improve old system even if we have more mature systems. Question is if it will work on ROM 3.0 (november 1992) and how much it will cost

[kolla]

Originally Posted by haynor666

Question is if it will work on ROM 3.0 (november 1992) and how much it will cost

It has been said quite a few times now, that most OS 3.1.4 changes are actually in the kickstart itself - so, no, you are supposed to update the kickstart ROMs with 3.1.4 ones. Alternatively, you can of course softkick from 3.0, if your system has a way of doing that (many configurations struggle with soft-kicking.)

[idrougge]

Originally Posted by ExiE

What a crazy idea.
XML based prefs format would be nice though.

Aren't most prefs formats IFF based? That makes making editor quite simple as long as the format is documented and guaranteed not to mutate.

[kolla]

Originally Posted by Olaf Barthel

What we got here in AmigaDOS is architecturally so different from what happens in the Unix kernel and the various shells that improvements in how the AmigaDOS shell/console combo works are in order.

I never considered Amiga shell unix shell-like, it reminds me more of the CLIs of various networking equipment (CatOS etc) and with a hint of DCL/VMS like features (assigns for example).

Incidentally, the command completion in the con-handler for OS4 was modeled on the WShell completion code

As in actual WShell code? Interesting - was Hawes involved? WShell code is available wile RexxMast code is not? Please tell more.

which offers suffix, prefix and combined prefix+suffix completion. I would be loath to lose this functionality and replace it with what shells today (bash comes to mind) are restricted to (suffix completion only).

I don't know how familiar you are with various unix shells, and I am not sure what you mean with prefix and suffix in this context, but they (zsh for example) are typically fully programmable to complete to anything you might wish. (Completion in bash has largely been done as an afterthought. In general, using bash should be avoided, which of course explains why it is most used - just another example of Murphy's law applied to technology.)

Ideally I would love to see more VMS/DCL like features, with much stricter requirements to shell command binaries. For example, I would require them to have command line template (the ".key") defined, so that the shell can extract that without even running the binary, and offer them for completion. Entering a command and a "?" should immediately expand to help (like in Cisco iOS etc.) without needing enter first and running the command first.

[Olaf Barthel]

Originally Posted by kolla

I never considered Amiga shell unix shell-like, it reminds me more of the CLIs of various networking equipment (CatOS etc) and with a hint of DCL/VMS like features (assigns for example).

Over the years the AmigaDOS shell was enhanced with the features of the Unix shells in mind.

It's not as if the feature set became close, you just started to realize how much was lacking, especially in terms of consistency, and how weird some of the solutions were, e.g. rewriting the entire script file to perform variable substitution instead of rewriting the individual lines after they were read.

As in actual WShell code? Interesting - was Hawes involved? WShell code is available wile RexxMast code is not? Please tell more.

No, this was just me replicating what WShell would do. I dearly missed how powerful the volume/assignment/directory/file completion was in WShell, so I re-created the functionality from scratch (WShell has great documentation, and many of the features it offers would be worth adopting).

I don't know how familiar you are with various unix shells, and I am not sure what you mean with prefix and suffix in this context, but they (zsh for example) are typically fully programmable to complete to anything you might wish. (Completion in bash has largely been done as an afterthought. In general, using bash should be avoided, which of course explains why it is most used - just another example of Murphy's law applied to technology.)

My knowledge of Unix shells is not particularly deep. These are complex tools: you probably pick one either because it's the only one available, or you find that it best serves your needs, and then you stick with it. I have used csh (was the default for NetBSD/OpenBSD at a time), zsh (had file completion and interactive command-line history browsing when csh didn't) and bash (better documentation, file completion, editing, history browsing and configurability than the competition) over the years, but now I mostly stick with bash.

What I meant with prefix/suffix, etc. matching is (I hope) quickly explained.

Say, you want to complete the name of the file "diskdoctor.c".

You type "disk", then hit tab to cycle through the matches. The completion process will keep the prefix "disk" and show you all possible matches which begin with "disk", e.g. "diskdoctor.h", "diskdoctor.c", etc. This is the basic completion procedure you would expect to work.

You type "doctor.c", move the cursor to the "d", then hit tab to cycle through the matches. The completion process will keep the suffix "doctor.c" and show you all the matches which end with "doctor.c", e.g. "diskdoctor.c".

You type "d.c", move the cursor to the ".", then hit tab to cycle through the matches. The completion process will keep the prefix "d" and the suffix ".c" and show you all the matches, e.g. "diskdoctor.c".

The file name completion code in the OS4 shell can do all three of these tricks, as can WShell from which I got the idea.

Ideally I would love to see more VMS/DCL like features, with much stricter requirements to shell command binaries. For example, I would require them to have command line template (the ".key") defined, so that the shell can extract that without even running the binary, and offer them for completion. Entering a command and a "?" should immediately expand to help (like in Cisco iOS etc.) without needing enter first and running the command first.

Sounds like you will need a different shell for that

The command templates were a good idea, shame that the remainder of the shell subsystem did not do just as good (or maybe it did, and AmigaDOS just got a very stripped-down version of it when the code was ported from Tripos).

The AmigaDOS shell design's strengths are few, and extensibility isn't even among its strengths. For example, it would be very convenient to be able to string together multiple commands per line, like you would for a Unix shell with ";" "&&" and "||", but there's no way to make this happen in a compatible manner.

[hexaae]

Originally Posted by Olaf Barthel

For example, it would be very convenient to be able to string together multiple commands per line, like you would for a Unix shell with ";" "&&" and "||", but there's no way to make this happen in a compatible manner.

One of most wanted feature missing in Amiga Shell unfortunately.
On the Amiga Shell you can only use "+" with Run to execute multiple commands in one go (RETURN at the end of each line):
run List +
echo Ciao! +
dir +
...