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Full Discussion: Questions on CLI and xwindow
Top Forums UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers Questions on CLI and xwindow Post 302953493 by bakunin on Friday 28th of August 2015 02:18:20 PM
Old 08-28-2015
Quote:
Originally Posted by jamie_123
Hi,

I was not sure about the terminology of the thing that I am about to explain, so it was very difficult to find relevant search results.

I want to use my computer using the ctrl+alt+f1 CLI without using a graphical system. However, at the same time, I would also like to do basic tasks like reading a PDF or open a browser. Switching back to a GUI for these tasks are quite distracting. Is there a way that I can launch windows under the CLI interface and somehow overlay them over the CLI?

Any pointers would be much appreciated.
It is much easier than you are thinking: a UNIX system (your Linux, as i can tell you use, is no exception) has a (theoretically) unlimited amount of possible terminals attached via "serial lines" (see "RS232" about what a serial line is). This is the basic way you connect to a UNIX system.

Your Linux has a graphically-enabled terminal, which you use to connect with locally and which runs an X-Window-system: a so-called "X-Server" (picture it as a driver for your graphic card plus a library with some function calls programs can use, providing graphic primitives like "draw line", "draw rectangle" and so on), a Window Manager on top of it and on top of this are some programs running (like Firefox, Open Office, etc.) which use the services these underlying programs provide. This is what you perceive as "your desktp".

At the same time you can connect to your system also at a more basic level, via classical serial terminals. Your system initially creates 7 of these (virtual) terrminals, between which you can switch with CTRL-ALT-F1 through CTRL-ALT-F7. In the seventh one (reachable by CRTL-ALT-F7) your graphical environment runs.

But terminals can be created on the fly and there are programs running under the X-Window-System (just like our Firefox) which provide such terminals. These programs are called "terminal emulators" (because they emulate a piece of hardware which is out of use today for most people, but still sets the standard of how things work). The most common one is called "XTerm" and they all operate more or less the same way: they create a window, start a shell inside it and when you leave the shell the window closes. You can run several instances of these emulators side by side and this way have several windows with open shells at the same time.

I hope this helps and you got some general knowledge and terminology out of it too. If you still have questions just feel free to ask.

bakunin
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App::CLI(3)						User Contributed Perl Documentation					       App::CLI(3)

NAME
App::CLI - Dispatcher module for command line interface programs SYNOPSIS
package MyApp; use base 'App::CLI'; # the DISPATCHER of your App # it's not necessary putting the dispather # on the top level of your App package main; MyApp->dispatch; # call dispather in where you want package MyApp::List; use base qw(App::CLI::Command); # any (SUB)COMMAND of your App use constant options => qw( "h|help" => "help", "verbose" => "verbose", 'n|name=s' => 'name', ); use constant subcommands => qw(User Nickname type); # if you want subcommands # automatically dispatch to subcommands # when invoke $ myapp list [user|nickname|--type] # note 'type' lower case in first char # is subcommand of old genre which is deprecated sub run { my ($self, @args) = @_; print "verbose" if $self->{verbose}; my $name = $self->{name}; # get arg following long option --name if ($self->{help}) { # if $ myapp list --help or $ $ myapp list -h # just only output PODs } else { # do something when imvoking $ my app list # without subcommand and --help } } package MyApp::List::User; use base qw(App::CLI::Command); use constant options => ( "h|help" => "help", ); sub run { my ($self,@args) = @_; # code for listing user } pakcage MyApp::List::Nickname; use base qw(App::CLI::Command); use constant options => ( "sort=s" => "sort", ); sub run { my ($self,@args) = @_; # code for listing nickname } package MyApp::List::type; # old genre of subcommand could not be cascading infinitely use base qw(MyApp::List); # should inherit its parents command sub run { my ($self, @args); # run to here when invoking $ myapp list --type } package MyApp::Help; use base 'App::CLI::Command::Help'; use constant options => ( 'verbose' => 'verbose', ); sub run { my ($self, @arg) = @_; # do something $self->SUPER(@_); # App::CLI::Command::Help would output PDOs of each command } DESCRIPTION
"App::CLI" dispatches CLI (command line interface) based commands into command classes. It also supports subcommand and per-command options. get_opt([@config], %opt_map) give options map, process by Getopt::Long::Parser interface of dispatcher cmd_map($cmd) find package name of subcommand in constant %alias if it's finded, return ucfirst of the package name, otherwise, return ucfirst of $cmd itself. get_cmd($cmd, @arg) return subcommand of first level via $ARGV[0] SEE ALSO
App::CLI::Command Getopt::Long AUTHORS
Chia-liang Kao <clkao@clkao.org> Cornelius Lin <cornelius.howl@gmail.com> shelling <navyblueshellingford@gmail.com> COPYRIGHT
Copyright 2005-2006 by Chia-liang Kao <clkao@clkao.org>. This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself. See <http://www.perl.com/perl/misc/Artistic.html> perl v5.18.2 2010-12-04 App::CLI(3)
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