Tools musings - Githubissues

Some kind of mechanism for BBC interop with Unix pipeline tools. Along these lines:

execute * command on Beeb, passing afsp, *SHA1SUM X.*
server finds matching Beeb files, collates corresponding PC file names
server runs sha1sum, passing in the PC file names
server collects output, sets that as the server string, and the Beeb prints it

*HELP TOOLS for a list.

Example use cases:

sha1sum, BBCBasicToText, etc. - syntax <afsp>, as above
grep - takes 1 fixed position option, then file names afterwards
also grep - has a zillion other options! What do? Beeb commands never really worked like that, aside from the occasional thing like *ACCESS. Maybe decide the syntax is <afsp> <string> <options>? - even though this is then the other way round from the PC.

Also: tools that take data via stdin. Some kind of pseudo-file that you can *SPOOL to, perhaps? This would be suitable as-is for fire-and-forget tools such as pmacs. Buffer stdin input, then send it to the tool when the file is closed. One open/write/close operation = one invocation of the tool. BREAK cancels. Is it possible to distinguish terminating *SPOOL and CLOSE#0?

For attempting to approximate pipelines, maybe buffer tool output after invocation, and allow the pseudo-file to be opened to examine the result. Not sure how useful this would actually be though.

Various options. Config file needed.

(Beeblink should be able to reload the config file while running. Check mtime once per second? Or whatever. Like the USB device autodetection.)

tom-seddon / beeblink

Tools musings #67