John Developer

The directory stack of Unix shells is a useful feature to set temporary “bookmarks” to directories, but I find pushd and popd long and cumbersome to type. I can recommend to alias them to ‘+’ and ‘-’, which are easy to remember and fast to type:

alias +='pushd .'
alias -- -='popd'

Konsole, the terminal emulator of KDE, is scriptable via DCOP (the IPC mechanism of KDE3). I use this feature to start a Konsole session with several tabs. Each tab has its title set to a meaningful name and possibly a command executed. I use this when running an application in JBoss. In the first tab JBoss is run, in the next I let the JBoss log scroll through, in the next I watch the application log, and so on. You may find your own usage for tasks you do daily.

One “trick” is to start Konsole with the --script option. Only then (for security reasons) will it let you send commands via DCOP that are executed in the shell.

This is the shell script I use:

#!/bin/sh

function createSession() {
        dcop=$1; shift
        title=$1; shift
        session=$($dcop konsole newSession)
        sleep 0.2 # ugly, but necessary
        $dcop $session renameSession "$title"
        for each in "$@"; do
                $dcop $session sendSession "$each"
        done
}

JBOSS=/opt/jboss
LOG=$JBOSS/server/default/log
konsole --script &
pid=$!
sleep 1
dcop="dcop konsole-$pid"
$dcop "konsole-mainwindow#1" maximize
session=$($dcop konsole currentSession)
$dcop $session renameSession "jboss-run"
$dcop $session sendSession "cd $JBOSS/bin"
createSession "$dcop" "jboss-log" "cd $LOG" "less server.log" "F"
createSession "$dcop" "app-log" "cd $LOG" "less application.log" "F"
createSession "$dcop" "tmp" "cd /tmp"

If you need more tabs add more createSession lines. You can add a variable number of commands that are to be executed in the tab. As you can see with the less command, you can also send simple keystrokes to the started programs.