akanga - shell interpreter

akanga is an rc based shell interpreter with additions for

• file locking,
• temporary files,
• reading standard input and,
• builtins for expression evaluation (let and expr).

In contrast to other shells rc (and so akanga too) have a small and clean language that make both very useful for programming shell scripts. I don't consider akanga to be superior to the bash for interactive use but it's my absolute favourite for shell programming.

The distribution archive comes with a preconfigured source directory that should compile on the average Linux system. the compiler will show more or less warnings

The current release of rc may be obtained from http://www.star.le.ac.uk/~tjg/rc/.

Sample Scripts

The archive comes with some scripts. They are intended as samples and as helpful tools.

• fileuser is similiar to fuser, while netuser comes close to the modern "netstat -aelp". The programs list processes having a particular file or network port opened. They provide their information in a more machine readable format.

• lp is a shortcut for the well known "ps -ax | grep processname".

• man2html is another manpage to HTML converter written in gawk. It links references to a given set of manpages found in the current file and trys to omit page headers and footers. mancc is a driver for man2html which compiles a set of manual pages.

• which is a replacement for my system's standard which program. It can find more than only one program and you can use shell patterns in the program name. Found programs can be optionally listed.

All scripts come with a manpage.

Manpages

Manual pages are available for akanga itself: akanga(1), akangaexpr(1), rc(1) and also for the sample scripts that come with it: fileuser(1), lp(1), netuser(1), man2html(1), mancc(1), which(1).

Download

The current version of akanga is 1.0.21: akanga-1.0.21.tar.gz.