rxvt sh under MSWin

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ted
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rxvt sh under MSWin

Post by ted »

This post is relevant if you used a cygwin-based NEURON installer, which includes an rxvt terminal. If you used a MinGW-based installer, you'll want to read about the bash shell window that comes with that package.

The rxvt shell window (launched by clicking on the rxvt sh icon in the NEURON Program Group) is pretty slick--it gives MSWin users access to a few very nice utilities. It's nowhere near as complete as you'd get by installing cygwin, or running UNIX/Linux/OS X, but even a few nice features and utilities is better than what Microsoft gives you.

So open an rxvt window, then at the command line type
pwd
and you'll get this response:
/cygdrive/c

ls
will show all the stuff at the root of c:

ls d:
or
ls /cygdrive/d
shows all the stuff at the root of d:

Tab completion works, which saves a lot of typing when doing cd or typing a long file name.

ls /cygdrive/c/nrn62/bin
shows all the executables that come with NEURON. Notice that these include
find
grep
sed
which can be very helpful indeed.

cd /cygdrive/d
pwd
and you get
/cygdrive/d

grep load_file *hoc
shows all the files in the current directory that contain load_file

modlunit filename.hoc
checks filename.hoc for consistent units.

mknrndll
compiles the mod files in the current directory and generates a dll.

mknrndll 2>errmsg.txt
captures stderr to errmsg.txt (after all, this is a bash shell), so you can review it later. Very helpful when you are trying to see if any of your mod files are not threadsafe.

nrniv -
starts NEURON sans its GUI, at which point entering the command
em
at the oc> prompt puts you in MicroEMACS (which is excellent if you're a MicroEMACS fan).

For an example of how to use the shell to execute batch runs, see
Automating tasks: -c "statement" and batch runs
http://www.neuron.yale.edu/phpBB/viewto ... =28&t=1747
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