General information

Bob is Not Intelligent console assistant. Bod doesn't try to replace any existing shells or build systems. It is designed for extend them. Often when you have few projects to work, they use different commands or build systems to maintain. To organize it, typically you have to add or global aliases to your shell or create scripts which grow over time to maintain it. Bob trying to solve this problem by adding ability to create local aliases for each directory. It is doing this by creating configuration files (in YAML) with defined aliases in each directory. When Bob is executed in selected directory, it reads configuration file (if exists) for selected directory for aliases.

INFO: This project is no longer maintained. Feel free to clone it and take care about it.

Configuration file

Bob looking for file .bob.yml in current directory (where it is executed). If it finds it, it reads all available commands from here. Sample configuration:

 version: 3.0
 - include: ../.bob.yml
 - command:
   name: list
   variables:
       - DIRECTORY = /home/user
   execute:
       - ls $DIRECTORY
   description: Show content of $DIRECTORY directory
   output: standard
   flags:
       - unixonly

Explanation:

• version: [version] - Optional entry. Minimal required version of the program to load this configuration file. If present, the program will load the rest of the configuration file only when the program version will be same or higher.
• - include: [path] - Optional entry. Add it, if you want to include any other Bob's configuration file. Path must be absolute or relative to the current configuration file.
• -command: - Each command for Bob must starts from this line. Each configuration file may have as much as you want commands defined.
• name: list - Name of the selected command. It will be used as argument for Bob. In this example, full command for Bob will be bob list.
• variables: - Mark start of list of environmental variables which will be added when running this Bob command.
• - [name] = [value] - Each environment variable which will be added during running this Bob command must start with hypen. [name] is the name of the variable which will be added, [value] is the value of the variable which will be added. Each command can have as much as you want variables.
• execute: - Mark start of list of commands or programs to execute when running this Bob command.
• - [command] - Each command or program which will be executed during running this Bob command must start with hypen. If you want to make that command maximum portable, use relative paths instead of absolute. If you want to execute command which contains space, put it in quotes or apostrofes. Note: command cd will not be executed. It is used by the program for set proper directory. Each command can execute as much as you want other commands or programs.
• description: - Command description, will be show on run bob help (or just bob) command.
• output: - Optional parameter. Redirect command output to the selected place. Possible options are: standard: redirect output to standard output, error: redirect output to standard error output, any other value will be treated as name for file to which redirect output. Path to the file should be relative to the current directory.
• flags: - Mark start of list of command's flags. Optional.
• - [flag] - Each flag assigned to this Bob command. Possible values are: unixonly: command is available only on Unix-like systems, windowsonly: command is available only on Windows systems, internal: command is not visible on commands list, but can be normally run (can be useful for recursive calls), evaluatevariables: command variables are treated as commands to run, and they result will be assigned to that variable, windowspath: paths in the command are in Windows style (use \ for directory separator), will be translated on Unix, unixpath: paths in the command are in Unix style (use / for directory separator), will be translated on Windows.

Commands to execute can have also variables used in the definitions. Variables start with sign $. $ and number after it means argument from command line entered during executing Bob command. For example, $2 means second argument after Bob command name. Thus, if you enter: bob dosomething one two, $2 will be replaced by word two. $ and any alphanumeric character(s) means environment variable with that name, available during executing this Bob command. In this example, it is variable $DIRECTORY. For more advanced, real life example, look at it own .bob.yml file.

Build the program from sources

Docker way

You can use Docker images adabuild and adabuildwin64 from the project dockerada. They contain all libraries and compiler needed to build the game. Recommended version is 9

To build Linux version of the program, download adabuild:9 image and type in console:

docker run --rm -v [path to source code]:/app ghcr.io/thindil/adabuild:9 /bin/bash -c "cd /app && gprbuild -p -P bob.gpr -XMode=release"

To build Windows 64-bit version of the program, download adabuildwin64:9 image and type in console:

docker run --rm -v [path to source code]:/app ghcr.io/thindil/adabuildwin64:9 /bin/bash -c "cd /app && gprbuild -p -P bob.gpr -XMode=release --target=x86_64-windows"

Classic way

To build you need:

• compiler - GCC with enabled Ada support or GNAT from:

  https://www.adacore.com/download/

  The program does not work with old compilers (like GCC 4.9) since it lacks full support for Ada 2012.

If you have it, navigate to the main directory(where this file is) to compile:

• The easiest way to compile the program is use Gnat Programming Studio included in GNAT. Just run GPS, select bob.gpr as a project file and select option Build All.

• If you prefer using console: in main source code directory type gprbuild -P bob.gpr for debug mode build or for release mode: gprbuild -P bob.gpr -XMode=release. If you have already installed Bob you can also use it to build the program. For debug mode: bob debug and for release mode: bob release.

Running it

When you are trying to run the program, use bob executable from bin directory.

To get list of available commands/aliases for Bob, run it or without any arguments or with argument help:

bin/bob will show list of available commands

bin/bob help will show list of available commands too

Testing versions

Here are available testing versions of the game. You can find them in Actions. Just select option from the list of results to see Artifacts list. To use them, just extract file(s) from the archive.

Generating code documentation

To generate (or regenerate) code documentation, you need ROBODoc and Tcl interpreter. If you have them, in the main program directory (where this file is) enter terminal command: others/generatedocs.tcl. For more information about this script, please look here. This version of script have set all default settings for Bob code. If you have Bob installed, you can also use for that the command: bob docs.

Contributing to the project

For detailed information about contributing to the project (bugs reporting, ideas propositions, code conduct, etc.), see CONTRIBUTING.md

Licenses

Bob is available under GPLv3 license.

---

That's all for now, as usual, probably I forgot about something important ;)

Bartek thindil Jasicki