What is it?
smenu is a selection filter just like sed
is an editing filter.
This simple tool reads words from the standard input, presents them in a cool interactive window after the current line on the terminal and writes the selected word, if any, on the standard output.
After having unsuccessfully searched the NET for what I wanted, I decided to try to write my own.
I have tried hard to made its usage as simple as possible. It should
work, even when using an old vt100
terminal and is UTF-8
aware.
The wiki (https://github.com/p-gen/smenu/wiki) contains screenshots and animations that detail some of the concepts and features of smenu.
How to build it?
smenu can be built on every system where a working terminfo
development platform is available. This includes every Unix and Unix
like systems I am aware of.
Please use the provided build.sh
to build the executable. This
script accepts the same arguments as configure
, type build.sh
--help
to see them.
The script autogen.sh
is also provided if you need to generate a
new configure
script from configure.ac
and Makefile.am
. The
GNU autotools will need to be installed for this script to work.
How to install it?
Once the build process has finished, a simple make install
with the
appropriate privileges will do it
Some examples.
Linux example.
This program should work on most Unix but if you are using Linux,
try to type the following line at a shell prompt (here: "$ "
):
$ R=$(grep Vm /proc/$$/status \ | smenu -n20 -W $':\t\n' -q -c -b -g -s /VmH) $ echo $R
Something like this should now be displayed with the program waiting for commands: (numbers are mine, yours will be different)
VmPeak¦ 23840 kB VmSize¦ 23836 kB VmLck ¦ 0 kB VmHWM ¦ 2936 kB VmRSS ¦ 2936 kB VmData¦ 1316 kB VmStk ¦ 136 kB VmExe ¦ 28 kB VmLib ¦ 3956 kB VmPTE ¦ 64 kB VmSwap¦ 0 kB
A cursor should be under "VmHWM "
.
After having moved the cursor to " 136 kB"
and ended the program
with <Enter>
, the shell variable R should contain: " 136 kB"
.
Unix example.
The following command, which is Unix brand agnostic, should give you a scrolling window if you have more than 10 accounts on your Unix with a UID lower than 100:
$ R=$(awk -F: '$3 < 100 {print $1,$3,$4,$NF}' /etc/passwd \ | smenu -n10 -c) $ echo $R
On mine (LANG
and LC_ALL
set to POSIX
) it displays:
at 25 25 /bin/bash \ sys 0 3 /usr/bin/ksh + bin 1 1 /bin/bash | daemon 2 2 /bin/bash | ftp 40 49 /bin/bash | games 12 100 /bin/bash | lp 4 7 /bin/bash | mail 8 12 /bin/false | named 44 44 /bin/false | ntp 74 108 /bin/false v
Note the presence of a scrollbar.
Testing and reporting.
The included testing system is relatively young, please be indulgent.
IMPORTANT the testing system has some dependencies, please read the
test/README.rst
before going further.
WARNING running all the test by running ./tests.sh
in the
tests
directory will take some time (around 15 min for now).
NOTE on some systems like *BSD some tests may fail. This can be explained by differences in posix/libc/... implementations. This can notably occur when some specific regular expressions or uncommon UTF-8 byte sequences are used.
If a test fails for unknown reason, then please send me its directory
name and the relevant .bad
file.
If you are hit by a bug that no test covers, then you can create a new
test in the tests
directory in a existing or new directory, read the
tests/README.rst
file, use an existing test as model, create an
.in
file and a .tst
file and send them to me as well as the
produced files.
Interested?
Please use the included man page to learn more about this little program.