Commands

There is an easier method of tailoring KAPPA to your requirements. If you frequently use certain commands, especially those with a long list of keywords and fixed values, you can define some C-shell aliases or ICL symbols for the commands. Like the shell's $HOME/.login, ICL has a login file. (See ``ICL for Unix'' Appendix in SUN/144, or SSN/64 for details.) If you add symbols to this file, each time you activate ICL these abbreviations will be available to you without further typing. What you should do is to create a login.icl in a convenient directory, and assign the environment variable ICL_LOGIN to that directory in your $HOME/.login file.

It is possible to have several ICL login files, each for different work in different directories. Now to abbreviate a command you put a DEFSTRING entry into the ICL login file. For example,

     DEFSTRING MYC{ON} CONTOUR CLEAR=F PENROT MODE=AU NCONT=7

defines MYC or MYCO or MYCON to run CONTOUR without clearing the screen, with pen rotation and seven equally spaced contour heights. The symbols are not limited to KAPPA. Indeed they can include shorthands for shell commands. For example,

     DEFSTRING DA ls -al

would make DA produce a directory listing of all files with sizes and modification dates.

You can check what the current login files are as follows.

     % printenv | grep ICL_LOGIN

For shell usage similar definitions can be made with aliases. For example,

     % alias mycon contour clear=f penrot mode=au ncont=7

is the equivalent of the DEFSTRING above, except that in keeping with UNIX tradition the command is in lowercase, and the alias cannot be abbreviated.