Skylight shell

Skylight shell is a small shell designed and built in FreeBASIC. It is currently available at SourceForge.net

History

Skylight shell was begun in November 2012 as CylonOS for PC. It was originally designed in Microsoft QBasic. Several weeks after the initial development began, it was ported to FreeBASIC. It was eventually released as Skylight shell v1.0. Since then, there have been several more versions. The current version is Skylight shell v2.0.1. The source code is now available.

Skylight shell 1.0

This was the first release of Skylight shell. It had a black window with green text. Its command format had a "." in between words such as "text.new". It also called itself "CylonOS 1.0 Command Line" in the password and first time setup window.

Skylight shell 1.1

This release changed the name of the "command.exe" to "cmd.exe". Also, they added a username part to the setup. It was displayed at the top of the window when it ran. It also adopted the current modified camel case syntax. One major problem is that the installer did not come with any documentation.

Skylight shell 2.0

This release introduced major improvements to Skylight shell. It now had a much larger (122x50 chars) blue screen similar to Windows PowerShell. It also had a much larger command set.

Skylight shell 2.0.1 (current)

This release is the current release of Skylight shell. In this version a short license agreement is shown in the 1st time setup. It also changed the structure of the command prompt. In addition, it has the FreeBASIC compiler included in the download.

Skylight shell 3.0 (planned)

This release is planned to include scripting and modifiable attributes such as a customizable command prompt. It will also convert to using command line parameters. It will use a different file structure. And it will include a multi-user login scheme.

Commands & Syntax

Skylight shell does not use command line arguments. Instead, it requests additional user input. Here is an example of the command TextNew:

SS 16:00:45 User Name# TextNew

Name? example

This is an example of the command TextNew. This is the text of the file.

Save(y/n)? y

message saved as example.txt

Here is a list of commands:

command

description

TextNew

CREATES a new one line text file.

FileNew

Creates a new one line file.

FileDisp

Displays a file.

FileDel

Deletes a file.

DirNew

Creates a new directory.

DirDel

Deletes a directory.

PassReset

sets a new password.

ProgRun

runs a .exe file.

FileCopy

Copies a file.

FileRen

Renames a file.

cd

Changes the directory path.

Date

Displays The current date.

Time

Displays the current time.

help

Displays the help file.

DOSComm

Allows the user to enter DOS commands.

Basic

Starts the Bywater BASIC interpreter.

Dir

Displays the contents of the current directory.

Cls

clears the screen.

CurDir

Lists the current working directory.

fbc

Compiles the specified file with the FreeBASIC compiler.