Introduction

I wrote the commands described in this manual simply because I felt they would be useful to have around. They are meant to be a supplement to the ones supplied with the operating system, not as a replacement for them. They are generally able to read from their default input, an ability sadly missing from the standard AmigaDOS commands making them rather awkward to use with pipes.

At present Commodore's shell does not support pipes, but some third party shells do. I recommend that you purchase William Hawes' excellent WShell 2.0. It has pipes, the backtick stuff is improved, and it also has better ARexx support, to name but a few things.

If you don't want to get a new shell or simply can't afford it, I will suggest that you get hold of Andy Finkel's ``ShellTools'' from Fish disk 673:

Four small useful programs. PIPE provides command line pipes, HISTORY allows the history to be loaded, saved, and listed, FOREACH is a fancy loop and variable expansion command, and RECORDER saves all console input and output in a file. Binary only.

Actually you should get them even if you have WShell or something equivalent, because Mr. Finkel's PIPE command addresses the problem of the AmigaDOS commands that can't read their default input (and really pathological cases, like SORT, that can't write to their default output either), and his FOREACH command opens a whole new world of possibilities with shell scripts.

All the commands are `pure' and can be made resident. If the p-flags are not set when you recieve the package you can set them with the PROTECT command.

If you have any questions or bug reports, you can send them to me at the following address:

Torsten Poulin
Banebrinken 99, 2, -77
DK–2400 København NV
Denmark
Phone: +45 39663111