Microshell.txt, a copy of ReadMeAlso by David N. Williams, created June 14, 1993, amd revised April 30, 1994 and March 8, 2019. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- This "read me" file comes from earlier versions, of Veltman's Micro Shell, and is not completely up to date. It nevertheless contains useful information. MVShell provides a UNIX-like command line interface for the Macintosh. Here are some hints for getting started. 1. LOGGING ON: After clicking on the M_Shell or M_System icon, the system expects you to log on. Press return to get the login prompt. Two accounts come already installed, with login id's "mjg" and "me". This version does not have passwords. At the login prompt, enter "me". If you then enter the command, "pwd", you will see the path for the home directory of the "me" account. The command "cd" with no path on the command line will bring you back to the home directory if you happen to be somewhere else. There is actually another account for "root", which has /usr as its home directory, and corresponds to the super user, who also needs no password. 2. LOGGING OFF: Enter "lo" to log out of your account. You can exit to the Macintosh Finder at any time by clicking the appropriate item in the M_Shell menu, or by pressing the "option" (not "apple") and "Q" keys simultaneously. 3. HELP: The command "commands" gives a list of MVShell commands. "Help" with no arguments describes the help available. "Help system" gives information special to the Macintosh system. We would suggest that you print out the complete help file, /usr/lib/y_help, but that requires a little work. Printing remains awkward in this beta implementation, unless you have the generic version of the Hewlett Packard inkjet printer (not the Mac-specific DeskWriter). Instead we have provided a MicroSoft Word version of that file, called help.txt, in plain text format, which can be printed from MicroSoft Word. It is too long to print from TeachText. There is at least one error in the help file, namely, the -v option in the rm command does the opposite of what is said in the help. The default for rm is to ask before deleting a file, while "rm -v" gives no chance to veto deletion. 4. ACCOUNTS: Two accounts "mjg" and "me" are preinstalled so you can see how it's done. To establish a new account, create a home directory of your own choosing with the "mkdir" command, or use the Macintosh Finder to make a new folder. Then edit the file /usr/bin/passwd by adding a new line analogous to the preceding two, which includes the new user id, analogous to mjg and me, and the path to the new home directory, analogous to /usr/mjg and /usr/me. It is important to enter a carriage return at the end of the line. If you mess up this file, you can still log in as root. You cannot use TeachText to edit the passwd file as it stands, because its type is "CODE" instead of "TEXT". The MVSystem doesn't mind if you use "chtyp" to change /usr/bin/passwd into a TEXT file, which can be edited with TeachText. In that case you have to be careful not to allow lines to wrap automatically without a carriage return at the end. Do "help chtyp". See the screens resulting from "help system" for information on the file "Init" (actually ".Init"), which is executed from the home directory upon login. To display the file just after logging in as "me", execute cat .Init There is an alias in the file /usr/me/Alia which allows you to execute p .Init instead. The distinction between a file and its "." prefix version is explained in the "help system" screens. To understand what is going on in the Init file provided with the system, execute help alias Then to display Alia: p Alia 5. EDITING: The "V" line editor is provided for those who prefer to stay within the command line interface, which is presently the best way to run Schoonschip. The documentation for V is in the file /usr/lib/Vmanual.e. It is short enough to print from TeachText. To use the editor, execute from the command line: V filename If "filename" doesn't exist, it will be created. You need to look at Vmanual.e to see what editor commands are bound to which keys. To see examples of how to customize the V keybindings, look at the Com_xx.sa files in /usr/lib. To exit from the editor, do ^C, and follow the bar at the top of the screen. If you write a file, a backup is created with "~" appended to the file name. The editor produces files with the default type "CODE". We have included a command script for invoking the editor called "E". Look at this script, in /usr/bin, as an example of how to write a simple script. It gives the editor output file the type "TEXT", which makes it visible to TeachText and MicroSoft Word for printing and other purposes. Thus, you can do E filename instead of "V filename" when you want the output file to be of type TEXT. 6. SCHOONSCHIP: Schoonschip on the Macintosh is command line and text file driven, just as it is on other systems. Its name from the command line is "Schip" (case is not respected on the Mac), and the command line syntax is in every way compatible with that on other systems.