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Setting up and using the Amiga shell

Setting up your shell

The standard AmigaOS shell is pretty basic. In order to improve your experience, you're best of installing some enhancements.

If you're used to Linux/Unix, you might like to try abc-shell, a Bash compatible shell for the Amiga.

KCON

KCON is one of the most commonly used shell enhancements for classic AmigaOS (3.9 and earlier). It provides scroll bars, command history, tab completion and more.

ViNCEd

ViNCEd is a shell replacements for classic AmigaOS that provides Unix like job control (^Z, bg, fg), iconfication, lot of customization options, customizable title bar, scroll bars, command history, tab completion and more. It can replace KCON and a number of other utilities. ViNCEd is built on a library that provides the core for a text editor (hence the name), that is documented and available for custom development.

ViNCEd also ships with UnixDirs3, which gets you slightly more Unix like path handling (e.g. “cd ..” works the way you'd expect if you're used to Linux/Unix)

ZShell

ZShell is an open source shell with command history, bash like tab completion (that is, inline rather than using a requester/dialog box, though you can bring up a file requester with ^f), colored prompts, a number of built in shell commands and unix style pipes (e.g. “dir | more” works as expected), menus with a number of short cuts, ability to hide file patterns (*.info files for example) from the built in commands. WARNING: While ZShell is very familiar if you come from Linux, and is great when it works, it has some pretty ugly bugs that might leave you with a hung shell window and might even trash other things on your machine.

What is the equivalent of ... in the Amiga shell?

Amiga wildcards vs. Unix / Windows wildcards...

Amiga commands accept wildcards in most situations where Unix / Windows commands would, but the wildcards are different.

On the Amiga, “#?” is used instead of “*”.

TODO: Expand.

Amiga style options vs. Unix / Windows style options

TODO: Describe ReadArgs style options.

Amiga replacements for common Unix/Linux commands

Linux Amiga
cd .. cd /
ls list
ls *.txt list #?.txt
rm foo delete foo
shell.1274172586.txt.gz · Last modified: 2010/05/18 08:49 by vidarh