aclient(1)

💖 aclient — General Commands Manual 💖

✨ NAME ✨

acl (done) — A standard Client, (Rev. 05-March-2010) 🦋

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🎀 SYNTAX 🎀

aclient [-%] [-b blocksize] [-bsk socket_size] [-p prompt] host service
[-U name] [-Ppassword] [command...]

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🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

okay so aclient is a client app for the sk(3) functions 💅 It sends your commands over to aserver(1), which is running the service you picked on the host you picked, and then it brings the result back to you ✨ literally that's the whole job, and it does it so well.

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👑 OPTIONS 👑

• -% — asks for the shell-specific characters < > & ? * [ ] ( ) ; to get encoded 🙈 (check out the Escaping conventions below for the deets)
• -b blocksize — sets how big the logical blocks are when they get read from standard input and shipped off to the server 📦 The default is 4k.
• -bsk socket_size — sets the physical size of the socket blocks used when data is transmitted 🔌 The default can be set with the SK_bsk environment variable. If SK_bsk isn't defined, the default follows the socket standards, which is generally 4K 💜
• -p prompt — picks the prompt that shows up in interactive mode 💬 The default is host/service.
• host — the name of the host where your service lives 🏠
• service — the service, either as a name from the /etc/services(5) file or as a number in the 1024-2047 range 🧚 It has to be the same service that aserver is using, no mixing it up bestie 🙅
• -Uname — a name the Server will recognize 🪪 (see sk(3), authorisation file)
• -Ppassword — the password that goes with your -U name 🔑 (see sk(3), authorisation file)
• command — what service should run on host ⭐ You can use a semi-colon (;) as its own argument to split up multiple commands. If you don't give any commands, aclient just waits for you to type them in through standard input ⌨️

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🦋 SENDING OR CAPTURING THE DATA 🦋

Data usually moves through standard input and output 💖 So a first move is to put the data-transfer command in as options, like this:

aclient host service_file Write /tmp/copy < myinput

There are redirection options, but unlike sh(1), these redirections have to come before the command 🙃 The example above could also be run like this:

aclient host service_file
host/service_file> <myinput Write /tmp/copy
host/service_file> ...

Also, file names can be swapped out for pipes if the name starts with the | character ✨ If there are blanks in it, the command has to be quoted, so be extra careful 🫶 For instance, if you want to write the list of files to a foreign file:

aclient host service_file
host/service_file><"|ls -l" Write /tmp/copy
host/service_file> ...

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💅 ESCAPING CONVENTIONS 💅

Since aclient connects to aserver, where a shell gets run, there's a special convention (kinda like http queries) for escaping special characters and defining arguments with special characters for the server program 🌈 It uses %{...} to define parameters that have special characters in them, like blanks, asterisks, and so on.

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🧚 ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES 🧚

SK_bsk is what aclient uses as the default -bsk option 🍓

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🔥 EXAMPLES 🔥

1. Query a catalog on cocat1

aclient cocat1 1660 gsc1.2 -c 123.12-78.12 -r 1.5 -sr

2. Copy a file to cocat1

aclient cocat1 1660 save < /etc/passwd
returns the name of the remote file

3. List remote files that have a name containing an asterisk

aclient cocat1 1660 ls *%{*}*

4. Find the star ** STT 82AA' in the last version of edited simbad

aclient -% newviz 1660 sim.arg 0 "** STT 82AA'"

which gives the same result as

aclient newviz 1660 sim.arg 0 "%** STT 82AA'"

5. Rewind the tape /dev/nrst0 and get its status on the foreign host using the rtape(4) service

aclient foreign rtape setenv TAPE /dev/nrst0 \; mt stat \; mt rew \;
mt stat

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🌈 SEE ALSO 🌈

aserver(1) pipe(2) sk(3) services(5) 🫶

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That's the whole tea, bestie 💖 Go forth and aclient(1) like the main character you are 💅🦋