As I was waking up yesterday morning I suddenly remembered I had an old
Perl script somewhere that provides a very simple file-based "help"
system. It occurred to me that it might be useful as a way of providing
an interactive glossary and basic help mechanism for use with Exim. I
have dusted off the script (I wrote it to learn Perl some years ago) and
created a small amount of data to show how the thing might work. I would
be grateful if a few people could take a look and tell me whether it is
worth pursuing this any further. What you need to do is:
1. Download
ftp://ftp.cus.cam.ac.uk/pub/software/programs/exim/Testing/exihelp.sample.tar.gz
into some scratch directory. When you unpack it, you should get
(a) A file called exihelp - this is the Perl script.
(b) A file called exihelp.spec.txt - this is the spec of how it works.
You need not read this at all, unless you are curious.
(c) A directory called exihelp.files.
2. Set the environment variable EXIHELP_PATH to point to the directory, e.g.
export EXIHELP_PATH=./exihelp.files
in a Bourne-ish shell.
3. Run the command "exihelp" on its own, or followed by any set of
keywords you feel like. There isn't too much data in there at the
moment, but here are some things that do work:
exihelp director
exihelp local part
exihelp failing local deliveries
exihelp test filter
exihelp mailtool locking
There are several more. They are just a random selection of topics that
came to mind. Obviously the data for some of them could be extended. The
keywords mostly work in any order.
Comments on any aspect of this are invited.
It is possible that the Perl may give problems on some systems. I
observe comments in the code about the difficulty of finding the
terminal depth (it needs that in order to do paging). If there are
problems, you may need to hack it around, because
I am now going on holiday for a week, and because it is then Easter, I
won't be around again until Tuesday, April 14th. I will then be here for
4 days, after which I am taking another week off, so don't expect too
much from me before April 27th. Better make that the 29th, since I'll
probably have a zillion emails to answer...
Philip
--
Philip Hazel University Computing Service,
ph10@??? New Museums Site, Cambridge CB2 3QG,
P.Hazel@??? England. Phone: +44 1223 334714
--
*** Exim information can be found at
http://www.exim.org/ ***
