zoidfaq - Frequently Asked Questions about Zoidberg

What's with the name ?

If you don't know where the name comes from, you should watch more cartoons.

Quoting some futurama episode about a certain doctor Zoidberg :

 "He's a weird monster who smells
     like he eats garbage and does"

This program was from the very beginning intended to become a huge and bloated monster.

Is it stable yet ?

NO ! If it is stable we'll call it 1.00 .

Is it safe to use it already ?

Kind of, as long as you don't try too fancy stuff with too many privileges.

But why !?

First of all because we like Perl better then shell script, and with the right glue you can do real powerful things with Perl statements in your shell.

Secondly because we wanted a platform to try out some experimental shell features, and it is really nice to be able to do so in Perl in an object oriented fashion. With zoid you don't need to patch archaic C code just to add for example another builtin function to your shell.

How do I turn off ansi colours ?

Set the environment variable CLICOLOR to 0 (null).

What's with the single arrow syntax ?

When you type Perl code without brackets around it, zoid does a little source filtering making a arrow 'CW->' (the dereference operator) at the start of a word an alias for 'CW$shell->'. Where 'CW$shell' is the main shell object.

 zoid$ ->Commands->cd(q/../)
 # is the same as
 zoid$ $shell->Commands->cd(q/../)

I dislike jobs ending without waiting for me to hit a key :(

This behaviour is called asynchronous notification. It is not a real default option; it is turned on in the default 'zoidrc' file. Remove the setting notify from our 'zoidrc' file or try CWset +o notify.

Does zoid have a RPROMPT ?

No, but Term::ReadLine::Zoid does :) If you use this module try setting CW$ENV{RPS1}.

Does zoid support utf8/encoding .../locale ?

No, but everyone agrees it would very nice if it did.

The problem is that I ([Pardus]) don't do anything with localization so I don't have any idea how this should work, no setup to test it, no experience this. Since I don't use this myself for me this has a low priority.

Since Perl has a lot of documentation and pragmas relating to this topic I have the feeling it shouldn't be to hard to have zoid at least understand character encoding correctly, but I'm going to need help from people with more experience in using these Perl features.

So If YOU want utf8/encoding .../locale in zoid and have some experience in using character encodings in Perl please contact [Pardus] by email.

I miss feature X, every shell should have feature X !

Probably it's on the TODO list, or at some list at least. Try the mailing list.

Can I use Zoidberg as a frontend for my own module ?

Yes you can. Basicly all you need to do is to set the mode of the shell to the namespace of your module; see BIzoiduser(1) for details. For a more elaborate example of using Zoidberg to build a custom shell application have a look at CWexamples/cpan.pl which is included in the source package.

How do I get Zoid to cooperate with a GUI toolkit like Tk ?

To my understanding the only thing needed to cooperate with any GUI toolkit is a heartbeat event to update the GUI. If you use our Term::ReadLine::Zoid library zoid will give you an event called beat. Try something like:

 $shell->{events}{beat} = \&update_gui;

... please send me (Pardus) a copy if you have working example code of a gui application using zoid.

My prompt looks something like: \C{bold,blue}\u@\h \A \C{green}\W\$\C{reset}

You need to have Env::PS1 installed to render that. Did you only install Zoidberg or did you install the full Bundle::Zoidberg ?

The default zoidrc file sets this PS1 string and counts on the availabilty of Env::PS1. If for some reason you choose not to use Env::PS1 you should change PS1 to something less obfuscated in the rc file.

I upgraded to a new version of zoid and it crashes immediately !?

If you use Term::ReadLine::Zoid, make sure not to use a version older then your version of Zoidberg. When using the latest version of zoid, the latest version of Term::ReadLine::Zoid should work. Try installing Bundle::Zoidberg instead of just Zoidberg.

If you have all dependencies right you might need to remove/clean the directory CW~/.zoid. Also it might be a good idea to clean up CW/usr/share/zoid and/or CW/usr/local/share/zoid before installing a new version.

I upgraded to a new version of zoid and it hangs !

See the previous question.

Versions of Env::PS1 prior to 0.4 are known to behave badly when used on a system with a case-insensitive filesystem. Install version 0.4 for the fix.

I got a segfault, is this a bug ?

Well, if it is a bug at all then probably it's a bug in Perl, not in zoid.

Most notoriously if you use globs in Perl code, Perl 5.8.0 can segfault; upgrading to at least Perl 5.8.2 fixes this problem.

On the other hand if zoid dies with an attempt to free an unreferenced scalar kind of message it probably is a bug in zoid, please report it.

perl(1), <http://zoidberg.sourceforge.net>