Re: Desiderata.... too

[gaw zay]

On Sun, 13 Jan 2002, Ged Haywood wrote:

> > I have a large set of dos ANSI color screens that I'd
> > like to see in nix, and a batch program to display them
> > in order, and then keep track of which screens were seen.
>
> As I understand it, by "batch program" you mean a kind of script.

they are usually called a batch script. I assume they inherited the term
from the mainframe environment.

> > Is there a nix tool to convert dos batch into Linux script?
>
> Hmmm.  Not anything that I'd consider trying.  The commands and
> the environment in which they are used are completely different.

I would half expect such a thing to exist, I mean someone must have
tried making such a thing I'd expect ... google it.

You are absolutly right about the environment and commands except for echo,
cd and rmdir from what I remember off the top of my head.


> > I subbed here hoping to learn something of ncurses,
> > which I had thought was the nix version of batch.
>
> What did you think it would do?  ncurses is a screen driver.  It's for
> a programmer to help him with his manipulating a display (and getting
> a user's keystrokes) in as hardware-independent a fashion as the kit
> will permit.  For example, the display may be the console of the local
> PC on which his program is running, but it may also be a dumb terminal
> hanging off a modem on the other side of the world.  I don't thinkit's
> what you need at all.

from what I understand (since I have never done any DOS programming) the
closet thing to curses is conio.h, which has exactly 0 to do with any scripting
language.

> > Is there a more appropriate scripting tool I should look into?
>
> Read about BASH.  There's a good book in my library called "Learning
> Bash".  If you need the ISBN drop me a line.

bingo. the BASH Programming HOWTOs out there are ok as well but books are
usually/always better. And like anything else, look at existing scripts.

Such as the ones on your system, the /etc/rc* files/directories depending
on your system are a good place to start.

good luck,

brian
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