When I prepared for the RHCE in Bangalore, India, I thought that I
would need an angel guiding me when using the console for the task.
When you're faced with the console and don't know how or where to go
on, an angel should appear and guide you step by step.
Instead of
creating a fancy, mac-like graphical applet - something that would
appear and tell you the steps you need - I just tried to
implement some basic help that complements the man pages, yet is not
a helper application that takes you away from the console. Angel
scripts - and that is the special concept - leave you *in the
console*, but *help* to enter the right commands (and the
command right!). It is a guidance - like an angel - when working on
the console.
ANGEL-SCRiPTS is a framework to get help on the console. It
is especially suited for tasks that demand more than one command to
be set up, like mounting a samba share, exporting a nfs directory, or
similar. Such tasks are contained in an angel-script (or angel).
The
angels (scripts) are located in a directory (basedir) with
subdirectories to allow grouping by subject. Multiple base
directories are possible (change with angel-basedir). Angels are
called by just typing ``angel'' (to see the base directory), by
referring to the name including its path (without base directory) or
by the find-option.
ANGEL-SCRiPTS will then display the file
- in case it is a file - or the contents of the folder, if the choice
is a folder.
The new concept is that after any invocation of
angel-scripts you are always back on the console. Angel-script uses
the numbers 1 to 255 and the letters b,f,r,u,n,p *as commands*
for navigation, i.e. after each step angel-scripts brings you back to
the console to use your own commands. You are not *in* the
application - you're with it.
This allows for additional commands,
checking of files, etc. or simply use only those commands that you
need.
Angels are for everyone. ANGEL-SCRiPTS are for those who do not remember exact parameters by heart or do not want to remember ten commands including the parameters. It it is a way to explain an installation processes with the ease that the person using it does not have to retype or copy-and-paste all the time.
There are countless websites and articles in magazines explaining an installation process or similar with a handful of commands to use on the console. This results in nasty switching of windows and copy-paste actions. Worse, if you have to be on runlevel one, there's no more http (except in text mode, if installed).
angelscripts aim exactly at this scenarios: That you have the commands of an article or a website at your fingertips in the console with short a explanations.
The option angel -u <url> will download an angel over the Internet and save it locally. After reading an article in a magazine or on a website, simply copy the URL of the angel! and all the commands are at your fingertips.
As angels are basically just lists of commands with some informational text, creating an angel is a very easy task.