HP-UX HB v13.00 Ch-11 - Software Development

HP-UX Handbook – Rev 13.00 Page 46 (of 101)
Chapter 11 Software Development
October 29, 2013
The Key shell is an extension of the standard Korn-shell. It uses hierarchical softkey menus and
context-sensitive help to aid users in building command-lines, combining the power of the Korn-
shell with the ease-of-use of a menu system. The Key-shell continually parses the command-line
and always presents the user with an appropriate set of current choices on the softkey labels. At
the bottom of the screen you can see the soft keys. Clicking on a button with the mouse or
pressing the function key invokes the command combined with a help line saying what to do
next.
Example: Pressing Change dir, then User dir invokes the following command with
accompanied by a help line
# Change_dir user_dir
Enter the name of the user whose home directory should be moved to.
Other Unix Interpreters
There are a few other native Unix tools which can be used to scan or modify ascii texts, e.g.
/usr/bin/awk and /usr/bin/sed. Both have their own scripting language, but they do not have
an interactive mode. Scripts can be passed to awk and sed either within the command line or in a
separate file with the –f option.
PERL
perl (practical extraction and report language) combines some of the features of C, sed(1),
awk(1) and Unix shells. perl is often used for generating dynamic web content. It is available
for a wide variety of operating systems, e.g. all Unixes, Windows, MacOS, which gives perl
scripts a similar platform independency as java.
For special purposes, e.g. database access, perl can be extended with various modules. A huge
list of available perl modules can be found on the CPAN [12] website. Most of these modules
consist of shared libraries, which are loaded when perl finds the appropriate instructions in the
perl script. These modules are of course platform dependent and need to be built on any
platform before they can be used. Additional modules that are downloaded from CPAN are not
supported by the Response Center.
Current perl versions for HP-UX are available from the HP Software Depot [5].