alert “Hello World” “go away” “hello” “ok”

With Haiku alpha1, the dev team seems to have slipped something else in quietly: filepanel

filepanel -d ~/Desktop -t “Open a File”

filepanel returns the full pathname of the selected file to standard output. This means that scripts can now ask the user where an app should be installed, for example, or whether to put a symlink in the Deskbar menu and what to call it.

Documentation seems limited to running filepanel with the –help parameter.

for i in * ; do
  j=`echo $i|tr 'A-Z' 'a-z'`
  mv "$i" "$j"
done

To change from lowercase to uppercase, reverse the order of ‘A-Z’ ‘a-z’. The script requires that the tr utility be in your /bin/ directory, which it should be by default. If you think you’ll use this often, make a script out of it for later use. Paste the above into a text file, but add the line

to the top, as the first line. Save it with the name “lowercase.” Then make it executable by typing chmod 755 lowercase into Terminal. Edit the file again to do the uppercasing trick, and save the new file as “uppercase.” Run chmod on that too. Move both of these files to your /boot/home/config/bin/ directory, and they’ll always be available to you from the command line.

If you’d rather download these scripts, ready to run, you can get them here.

It would take a complex explanation of exactly how the bash shell works to explain why not, but if you need to accomplish this task, here’s how: type the following into the shell, hitting Enter after each line.

for i in *.txt
do
mv "$i" "$(echo $i | sed s/.txt$/.html/)"
done

In a nutshell, here’s what’s going on: you establish a loop to go through all the filenames in the current directory ending in .txt (* refers to all files in the current directory). “Do” means you’re going to look at the first file and do something with it. That something is the move command, mv. We move the first file from its current location of {variable} to {variable.html}. The tricky part is that we need to use sed (the stream editor) to substitute the string “txt” at the end of the line with the string “html”. Done means we’re ready to move to the next file, and also serves as a flag for the process to exit when all files have been processed.

If you need to use this function frequently, save the whole block as a script prefaced with the magic cookie #!/bin/sh and call it “ren” or something else intuitive.

Note that just changing the extensions will not change the filetypes, because BeOS doesn’t use extensions as its primary means of identifying filetypes. To do that, see the tip Batch-changing filetypes.

Add to ~/config/etc/ppp-script:

——————–

if [ "$1" = "down" ]
then
if [ -f /var/tmp/ppp_up ]
then
touch /var/tmp/ppp_down
rm /var/tmp/ppp_up
date "+%D %T sess $3 closed" >> /var/log/online.log
MediaPlayer /boot/home/config/sounds/Startup Sounds/DarkStart.aiff &
else
if [ -f /var/tmp/ppp_down ]
then
rm /var/tmp/ppp_down
else
MediaPlayer /boot/home/config/sounds/System Beeps/BoingAlert2.aiff &
fi
fi
fi



Now create this script: /boot/home/config/bin/keep_alive (don't forget to chmod this to 755):

while [ -f /var/tmp/ppp_up ]
do
ping -c 1 -s 8 www.be.com
sleep 10
done


So these two pieces of code work in tandem to keep your connection humming along happily. You don’t need to launch any Terminal windows, press any Ctrl-C to quit, or anything else messy. Just connect and disconnect manually from the Deskbar replicant.

 #!/bin/sh

However, if you want to see exactly what’s going on while a script is running, start your script with

instead. The shell will report back to you with every step, making it much easier to see exactly what’s going on (and thus how to fix it if necessary).


Terminal -t "rc5des" /boot/home/config/bin/rc5des &


Note that you must specify the complete path to the binary you want to run, even if it’s already in your path. This is a perfect way to launch Terminal jobs from your UserBootscript.

First make a copy of one of your backgrounds and call it something like “background.jpg”. Put it in a directory where you can pretty much ignore it, like “/boot/home/config/settings“.

Now you need to set your background in the preferences to “/boot/ home/config/settings/background.jpg“.

Next, drop all the backgrounds you want to appear in rotation into a single directory. This script assumes that location is /boot/home/Backgrounds.

Ok, now the easy part, edit your “userBootscript” file and add the following code:

	N=`date +%S`
	N=`expr $N + 0`
	I=0
	for file in /boot/home/Media/Backgrounds/*
	do
		I=$[$I + 1]
	done
	N=$[($I * $N) / 60]
	for file in /boot/home/Media/Backgrounds/*
	do
		if [ $N -eq 0 ]
		then
			cp $file /boot/home/config/settings/background.jpg
			break
		fi
		if [ $N -ne 0 ]
		then
			N=$[$N - 1]
		fi
	done

You will need to change “/boot/home/Media/Backgrounds” to your background folder, and then after you restart twice, you’ll be all set.

If you’d rather not bother creating these scripts manually, you download them as a prefab collection here. Unpack them and place them in /boot/home/config/scripts, then place links to them on the Desktop.

Note: The location above assumes that you’ve added this path to your PATH environment variable. For instructions on that, see Add a scripts directory to your path.

To do this manually, save the scripts below to /boot/home/config/scripts.

rc5on

rc5des -quiet &

rc5off

kill -term rc5des

rc5flush

Terminal -t "RC5DES Flush" /boot/home/config/bin/rc5des -flush

rc5fetch

Terminal -t "RC5DES Fetch" /boot/home/config/bin/rc5des -fetch

rc5update

Terminal -t "RC5DES Update" /boot/home/config/bin/rc5des -update

Next you’ll need to make your scripts executable. From the Terminal, cd to the directory containing your scripts and type:

chmod 755 *

This will make all of the scripts in the directory executable, which is essential to making them clickable. The last thing to do is to create links to them on your Desktop. Select all five scripts, right-drag them to the Desktop, and choose Create Link from the context menu.

You should find that you can now start, stop and flush the RC5DES cruncher by simply clicking the icons! Optionally, you can add custom icons to your new scripts for easy identification (icons are already included in the download mentioned above).

PATH=$PATH:/boot/home/config/scripts

to /boot/home/config/boot/UserSetupEnvironment or /boot/home/.profile. If you add it to the former, you’ll need to reboot for it to take effect. If you add it to the latter, you’ll need to open a new Terminal window (because UserSetupEnvironment is applicable to the whole environment, whereas .profile is read into memory every time you open a Terminal window).

getlibs appname

(where appname is the name of the application you want to investigate) in your Terminal to find the needed libraries.

getlibs()
{
        if [ "$#" = "0" ]; then
                echo "No executable specified."
                return 1
        fi
        if [ -f "$1" ]; then
                objdump --all-headers "$1" | grep NEEDED | awk '{
print $2 }'
        else
                echo "Can't find executable '$1'."
                return 1
        fi
        return 0
}