Take wget, for example: an excellent command-line utility that will reach out over the net and retrieve a file. You will find it on both Bebits and Haikuware, and if you download it you should install it into /boot/home/config/bin.

But wait a minute! Haiku already has its own wget, in /boot/system/bin. Now suppose you had both, which one would activate if you typed  wget in the Terminal? That is easy to find out, just type the following command:

echo $PATH

and it will spit out a list of directories all ending with “bin” (for “binary”). Whenever you type a command in the Terminal, it will search those directories, in that exact order, for something to execute. On a typical system, /boot/home/config/bin always wins.

In fact, Haiku contains a lot of these command-line utilities that used to be separate downloads in BeOS. When I examined my bin directories I found duplicates of wget, top, reindex, clear and tput.  Now maybe the one in /boot/home/config/bin really is more up-to-date, in which case you can just leave it alone. But will you remember to check after Haiku next receives an update? And there is a real possibility that you are using an out-of-date version.

So before you download and install anything for the Haiku command line, just open a Terminal and type that command to see if it isn’t there already.

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.

PS1=’$ ‘

Edit it so that it reads

PS1=’$PWD> ‘

The next time you open up Terminal, the prompt will report the current directory, no matter what you do. PWD is a Unix/Be command meaning Print Working Directory — you’ve just told Terminal to print the working directory every time it displays a prompt. If you’re a migrating DOS person, you’ll welcome this extra bit of information.

It should be pointed out that using the single quotes (”) are important. If you use double quotes (“”) instead, the prompt will be set to the current directory at the time of opening the terminal and then stay unchanged.

Reason is that within double-quotes all variables like $PWD are evaluated immediately, whereas within single quotes they aren’t. That means:

PS1=’$PWD> ‘ -> PS1 is in fact set to ‘$PWD> ‘
PS1=”$PWD> ” -> PS1 is in fact set to ‘/boot/home> ‘

You can further customize your prompt by including actual phrases, or anything you find useful or fun. For instance: /boot/home/ — What’s up, cap’n? >

Thanks to Lars Duening for the shell expansion details on this tip.

By setting parameters in your .profile, there are seemingly endless ways to customize your Terminal prompt.

For example, inserting PS1='$PWD' will make your prompt display the current working directory, which can be handy. However, as you work farther down a set of directories, your prompt can end up taking most of the line.

Instead, the string W will print the name of the directory you are in, without the full path. You can even mix it with color commands. The following example gives you the current directory, without the path, but with a red colon at the end of the prompt.

PS1='W/?33[1;31m:?33[m '

There are lots of other things you can include in your Terminal prompt, listed below: (stolen from http://d oc.rmplc.co.uk/linux/LDP/HOWTO/Bash-Prompt-HOWTO-2.html, and probably available from many other places as well. Not all of these are useful yet on BeOS.)

       a     an ASCII bell character (07)
       d     the  date  in  "Weekday  Month  Date" format  (e.g., "Tue May 26")

       e     an ASCII escape character (033)
       h     the hostname up to the first `.'
       H     the hostname

     newline

     carriage return
       s     the name of the shell, the  basename  of  $0  (the portion
 following the final slash)
       	     the current time in 24-hour HH:MM:SS format
       T     the current time in 12-hour HH:MM:SS format
       @     the current time in 12-hour am/pm format
       u     the username of the current user
       v     the version of bash (e.g., 2.00)
       V     the  release  of  bash, version + patchlevel (e.g., 2.00.0)
       w     the current working directory
       W     the basename of the current  working  directory
       !     the history number of this command
       #     the command number of this command
       $     if  the effective UID is 0, a #, otherwise a $

nn   the character  corresponding  to  the  octal number nnn
       \     a backslash
       [     begin a sequence of non-printing characters,
       which could be used to embed a terminal control sequence into the prompt
       ]     end a sequence of non-printing characters

The prompt style has four elements: foreground color, background
color, effect (shadow or normal) and prompt script/functions.

The escape code template:

'e[X;Y;Z + m A' or '?33[X;Y;Z + m A'

the escape code can be "e" or "?33" its your preference.
You can arrange/exclude X, Y, Z in any order and as long as they are
seperated with a ";" and the last value has an "m" after it.

Example:

ps1='e[40;01,37m $PWD e[m/>'

ps1='e[01;34m $PWD e[m/>'

Use the escape sequence every time you want a change the style of
the prompt.

Finally, here is the list of colors codes and effects taken out
of my /boot/home/.profile (you can cut and past this if you want)

PS1='[e[0;36;44m 	 e[m] [e[0;34;46m $PWD e[m]
[e[1;37;40m
DarkStar e[m]-['

Some tips:

• using the same forground and background color will make it
  really hard to read.
• keep in mind that PS1 command will display spaces.

BeBox_Updater_ROM_September23_1997.tar.gz

and you’re already in the directory where that file lives. Try typing

gunzip BeB

and then hit the Tab key. You’ll see your command line automatically fill in with the complete filename, and all you have to do is hit Return. But what if there’s another file that starts with BeB? No problem — the command line is smart — it will complete out to the point where it’s not sure which file you mean. Then all you have to do is type the next unique letter or letters and hit Tab again.

ps

This will display a list of all running processes. Each process has an associated ID# at the left of the screen. Type

kill 123 [where 123 is the ID of the app that's misbehaving]

and it will die. If it doesn’t die, try the super killer:

kill 123 -9

If you don’t want to scan through the whole list of running processes and you know the name of the naughty app, use grep to find its ID quickly:

ps | grep appname

which will display just the lines in ps that contain that appname.

If the machine has become so unstable that you can’t even open Terminal, try switching to another workspace with the F keys (Alt+F1, Alt+F2, etc.) and try running Terminal from there. Another option if you can’t open a terminal is to get on another machine and telnet into your BeOS machine. You can then kill the offending app remotely. It’s a good idea to have a copy of ProcessController on your system to handle process and app management graphically. To be certain Tmanager and/or Terminal will be launchable on an unstable system, just have them launch automatically upon boot by launching them from your UserBootScript. That way they’ll already be open and ready to handle contingencies.

If you’re trying to remember the name of a particular command, and can only think of the first one or two letters, just type those letters and hit Tab twice. All available commands starting with that letter or letters will appear in a list.

The same trick works when constructing a command looking for the names of files to operate on — typing a letter and hitting Tab twice will show a list of all allowable filenames.

This is much simpler than grepping for the pid.

But there’s an even cleaner way, that you might try first. Download the
href=”http://w3.datanet.hu/~amezei/”>hey scripting utility and install it
in /boot/home/config/bin. Then use:

hey ‘appname’ quit

This will, as it suggests, tell the app to quit itself, which might shut it
down a little cleaner than a raw kill, although usually if you’re at this
stage, you’re gonna have to do a kill anyway.

/boot/beos/bin/fortune
printf "
"

Fine-tune your listing until you’ve got it right, then just use “>” to redirect the output, then specify a path and filename. For example:

ls -l -R *.jpg > /boot/home/Desktop/jpegs.txt

This will look down recursively from the current directory, creating a detailed listing of files ending with the .jpg extension, then spit the results to a file called jpegs.txt on your desktop.

To view a file’s attributes from the Terminal, type listattr filename.

However, this will only show you the byte size, name, and type of the attributes. It won’t show you its value (contents). To see contents, use the Tracker Add-On AttributeViewer. To add attributes to a file type addattr fieldname value filename

For example: addattr huey duey foobar will add an attribute named “huey” with a value of “duey” to a file called foobar. To remove attributes, use: rmattr fieldname filename. You can get more details on usage by typing addattr –help .

Better yet, check out the following shell scripts that use this and other commands to process multiple files…

email_conv – Email Conversion Package, at
http://www.box.net.au/~jaq/ema il_conv.zip
[Editor's note: URL no longer functional].

People Porter, at
http://www.betips.net/software/