sysline.1

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.\"     @(#)sysline.1	6.5 (Berkeley) 6/24/90
.\"
.TH SYSLINE 1 "%Q" "CCCGT Modified"
.UC 5
.SH NAME
sysline \- display system status on status line of a terminal
.SH SYNOPSIS
.B sysline
[
.B \-bcDdehijlmpqrstw
] [
.B \-H\ remote
] [
.B +N
]
.SH DESCRIPTION
.I Sysline
runs in the background and periodically displays system status information
on the status line of the terminal.
Not all terminals contain a status line.
Those that do include the h19, concept 108, Ann Arbor Ambassador, vt100,
Televideo 925/950 and Freedom 100.
If no flags are given,
.I sysline
displays the time of day, the current load average, the change in load
average in the last 5 minutes, the number of users (followed by a `u'),
the number of runnable processes (followed by an `r'), the number
of suspended processes (followed by an `s'), 
and the users who have logged on and off since the last status report.
Finally, if new mail has arrived, a summary of it is printed.
If there is unread mail in your mailbox, an asterisk will appear after the
display of the number of users.
The display is normally in reverse video (if your terminal supports
this in the status line) and is right justified to reduce distraction.
Every fifth display is done in normal video to give the screen a chance
to rest.
.PP
.SS Options
The following flags may be given on the command line.
.TP 12
.B \-b
Beep once every half hour and twice every hour, just like those obnoxious
watches you keep hearing.
.TP
.B \-c
Clear the status line for 5 seconds before each redisplay.
.TP
.B \-D
Print out the current day/date before the time.
.TP
.B \-d
Debug mode \- print status line data in human readable format.
.TP
.B \-e
Print out only the information.  Do not print out the control commands
necessary to put the information on the bottom line.  This option is
useful for putting the output of
.I sysline
onto the mode line of an emacs window.

.TP
.B \-H remote
Print the load average on the remote host \fIremote\fP.
If the host is down, or is not sending out \fIrwhod\fP packets, then
the down time is printed instead.
.TP
.B \-h
Print out the host machine's name after the time.
.TP
.B \-i
Print out the process id of the
.I sysline
process onto standard output upon startup.
With this information you can send the alarm signal to the
.I sysline
process to cause it to update immediately.
.I sysline
writes to the standard error, so you can redirect the standard
output into a file to catch the process id.
.TP
.B \-j
Force the sysline output to be left justified even on terminals capable of
cursor movement on the status line.
.TP
.B \-l
Don't print the names of people who log in and out.
.TP
.B \-m
Don't check for mail. 
.TP
.B +N
Update the status line every N seconds.
The default is 60 seconds, minimum is 10 seconds, maximum 500 seconds.
.TP
.B \-p
Don't report the number of processes which are runnable and suspended.
.TP
.B \-r
Don't display in reverse video.
.TP
.B \-q
Don't print out diagnostic messages if something goes wrong when starting up.
.TP
.B \-s
Print "short" form of line by left-justifying
.I iff
escapes are not allowed in the status line.
Some terminals (the Televideos and Freedom 100 for example)
do not allow cursor movement (or other "intelligent" operations)
in the status line.  For these terminals,
.I sysline
normally uses blanks to cause right-justification.
This flag will disable the adding of the blanks.
.TP
.B \-t
Print the time in 24-hour format.
.I sysline
normally prints the time in 12-hour format
unless
.I sysline
was compiled with the CLOCK24 option.
.TP
.B \-w
Window mode \- print the status on the current line of the terminal,
suitable for use inside a one line window.
.SS File contents displayed on the status line
.PP
If you have a file named .who or .sysline in your home directory,
then the contents of that file is printed first on the status line
(the contents of only one of these is displayed; only if .who is not
found is .sysline read).
One common use of this feature is to alias chdir, pushd, and popd to
place the current directory stack in ~/.who or ~/.sysline after it
changes the new directory.
.PP
Another might be to display short messages from for instance cron(8)
or at(1).
.PP
(Note: dependent on compiling options, these files may be
named .who.<tty> and .sysline.<tty> where <tty> is the basename
of the terminal on which the copy of sysline is running).
.SS Temporarily disabling sysline
.PP
If you have a file .syslinelock in your home directory, then
.I sysline
will not update its statistics and write on your screen, it will just go to
sleep for a minute.  This is useful if you want to momentarily disable
.I sysline.
Note that it may take a few seconds from the time the lock file
is created until you are guaranteed that
.I sysline
will not write on the screen.
(Note: dependent on compiling options, this file may be named .syslinelock.<tty> 
where <tty> is the basename of the terminal on  which the copy of sysline 
is running).
.SH STATUS-LINE COLORIZATION
You can give the status line most any color you like by setting an
environment variable
.B SYSLINE_COLORS
(or
.B SYSLINE_COLOURS
). This variable is expected to contain the values of attributes and
colors of both the normal status line and the reversed status line.
.PP
Its format is
\fB"rv=aa\fR[\fB;bb\fR[\fB;cc...\fR]]\fB:nm=zz\fR[\fB;yy\fR[\fB;xx...\fR]]\fB"\fR
, where aa, bb, ... and zz, yy, ... each represent a color attribute
or (foreground or background) color, separated from one another by a
semi-colon. The attributes/colors following
.B "rv="
are for the reversed status line (the one displayed most of the
time ), those following
.B "nm="
are for the normal (un-reversed) status line (the one that will
show only every fifth display - I know this seems counterintuitive).
For clarity, separate the "rv=" part from the "nm=" part with a
character like a blank or a colon; the order of rv or nm is
unimportant. A maximum of 8 attributes/colors can be set for each.
.PP
An example: to have a bold/blue-bg/yellow-fg status line which
becomes a bold/red-bg/white-fg status line every fifth display,
do:
.br
          SYSLINE_COLORS="rv=1;44;33:nm=1;41;37"
.PP
Note that fancy colorization of the normal status line defeats the
purpose of displaying it in normal video, namely to give the screen
a rest every 5th display.
.sp
.RS +.2i
.ta 1.0i
.nf
Attributes are as follows (incomplete):

	\fB0\fR = all attributes off
	\fB1\fR = intensity 2 (bold)
	\fB2\fR = intensity 0 (half-bright)
	\fB4\fR = underline on
	\fB5\fR = blink on
	\fB7\fR = reverse on
.fi
.RE
.sp

.sp
.RS +.2i
.ta 1.0i 2.5i 4.0i
.nf
Color codes are as follows:

	color       foreground  background
	-----       ----------  ----------
	black       \fB30          40\fR
	red         \fB31          41\fR
	green       \fB32          42\fR
	yellow      \fB33          43\fR
	blue        \fB34          44\fR
	magenta     \fB35          45\fR
	cyan        \fB36          46\fR
	white       \fB37          47\fR
.fi
.RE
.sp

.SH MAIL CHECKING
The original Linux port of
.I sysline
will only check for mail if
/var/spool/mail/${USER}
exists;
if USER is not defined,
.I sysline
will not check for mail.
(It will not issue any warning.)

At CCCGT,
.I sysline
has been modified
so that if the MAIL variable is defined,
it will check mail at the mailbox $MAIL;
otherwise it will check for mail in
/var/spool/mail/${LOGNAME}
in addition to
/var/spool/mail/${USER}.
.SH ENVIRONMENT
.ta 2.4i
.nf
TERM			name of terminal (must have the hsl capability)
MAIL			path to mailbox file
USER			login name, for mail checking
LOGNAME			login name to use if USER is not defined
SYSLINE_COLORS		see the STATUS-LINE COLORIZATION section
.fi
.SH FILES
.ta 2.4i
.nf
/var/run/utmp		names of people who are logged in
/proc			process information file-system
/var/spool/rwho/whod.*	who/uptime info for remote hosts
${HOME}/.who		information to print on bottom line
${HOME}/.sysline	information to print on bottom line
${HOME}/.syslinelock	when it exists, sysline will not print
.fi
.SH AUTHORS
John Foderaro
.br
Tom Ferrin converted it to use termcap.
.br
Mark Horton added terminfo capability.
.br
Linux port \- bjdouma@xs4all.nl (Bauke Jan Douma)
.br
Ambrose Li <ai337@freenet.toronto.on.ca>
added a few mail/MIME-related minor fixes.
.SH BUGS
.br
If there is too much to display on one line, the excess is thrown away.
.br
The mail check does sloppy header processing, so unusual headers,
such as ones with continuation lines,
or ones with more than one whitespace character after the keyword,
might confuse it.
.br
MIME mail might cause strange behaviour.
In particular,
.I sysline
knows nothing about charsets,
so letters in foreign languages
(e.g., Shift-JIS mail arriving on ISO-8859 terminals,
or Big5/ISO-8859 mail arriving on JIS terminals)
may cause the terminal to go crazy.
.SH BUG REPORTS TO
For this Linux port:
.br
Bauke Jan Douma		bjdouma@xs4all.nl