Back To BASIC – Chipmunk BASIC 3.1 on CENTOS 7

Back in December of 2014, I posted an article where I converted a BASIC program from the 1982 Commodore 64 Users Guide and converted it to a BASH script on CENTOS 6.5, you can read the article by clicking here (https://www.catracing.org/hendrb/bash-script-guess-number/). Month after month this has been one the most popular posts on my blog.  So Ibegan to wonder, instead of converting the program to BASH, what options are there for us to actually program and run BASIC programs natively under LINUX.

When I primarily used a Mac computer, there was a version of BASIC written for MacOSX called Chipmunk BASIC. So off I went to Google, and found the authors web page.  Sure enough there is a compiled version for LINUX.  So just what is Chipmunk BASIC?  Direct from the authors website, “  Programming Language. Chipmunk Basic presents a vintage traditional command-line console programming environment, and supports a very simple, old-fashioned, and easy-to-learn Basic Programming Language syntax.”  This sounds like what I am looking for!
There are a couple of catches. one is that you have to download and install the program and the MAN pages manually. No sweat, I am up for the challenge!  The second catch is that this version of BASIC must be run in a GUI under X Windows. Once XWindows server has been installed and started, you can access Chipmunk BASIC from a terminal or remote session however.

Actually, it turned out to be a very very simple process.   Let’s take a look by installing it on my demo virtual box.
First lets see if we have some prerequisite utilities installed that will allow us to download and uncompress  the BASIC program files.  An easy way to check to see if you already have these utilities installed is to see if the MAN pages are installed
$ man wget

If the man page displays then the utility is installed.

If the utility is not installed (As is the case of unzip), you will receive an error message, which is displayed below when I try and view the MAN page for unzip.

So lets go ahead and install unzip using the yum command.

$ sudo yum install unzip

You must also have a desktop environment installed, so if you installed CENTOS 7 using the minimum install and only use via a console, or a remote shell. We will install GNOME Desktop now.

$sudo yum groups install “GNOME Desktop”
You can either start the X Windows Server now, or after we install Chipmunk BASIC install. To do this, simply execute the following command.

$ startx

We are now ready to download Chipmunk BASIC, Cd to the directory that you want the file to be downloaded to, I have a subdirectory in my HOME directory called Downloads, which I will make sure I am in and if not I will change to that directory.

$ pwd

/home/username

I am not in the correct directory, but since I am in my home directory, a simple cd to Downloads will work.

$ cd Downloads

[username@cr-demo Downloads]$

As you can see, the CD was successful. If I was somewhere else on the system, say /etc.  I can easily get to my home directory using the ~ shortcut.

[username@cr-demo etc]$ cd ~
[username@cr-demo ~]$ pwd

/home/username

Example II:

[username@cr-demo etc]$ cd ~/Downloads
[username@cr-demo Downloads]$
As mentioned above, to actually download the Chipmunk BASIC archive, we use the wget command, with the URL as noted below.

Example I:

$ wget http://www.nicholson.com/rhn/files/cbas367b5-linux-x86_64.zip

You will then see the following screen, and the file should be downloaded.

If you now do a directory listing, you will see your file.

[username@cr-demo Downloads]$ ll

total 180
-rw-rw-r–. 1 local_hendrb01 local_hendrb01 183652 Jun 24 2014 cbas367b5-linux-x86_64.zip

Now we must unzip the file

Usage: unzip filename.zip -d destination_folder

Since we just want the file unzipped to our current directory, we will just enter unzip filename.zip

Example I:

 

We now have 4 new files in our Downloads directory, you can delete the zip file using the rm command if you want to.

$ rm cbas367b5-linux-x86_64.zip

The 4 new files are

-r-xr-xr-x. 1 username groupname 335192 Jun 24 2014 basic
-r–r–r–. 1 username groupname 52635 Apr 22  2011 basic.man.txt
drwxrwxr-x. 2 username groupname     20 Dec 30 20:28 man
-r–r–r–. 1 username groupname   3412 Jun 24  2014 README

File descriptions:basic is the main basic executable, you will want to move this file to /usr/bin
Example:

$ mv basic /usr/bin

Lets also make sure that the owner and group are set to root root. Since it was unzipped under out normal user account, it will most likely show your username.  Not sure if this will cause issues or not, but better be safe than sorry!

Example:

$ ll basic

-r-xr-xr-x. 1 username groupname 335192 Jun 24 2014 basic

$sudo chown root:root basic

$ ll basic

-r-xr-xr-x. 1 root root 335192 Jun 24 2014 basic

Now let’s put the man file where they belong, if we currently try and perform a man on BASIC, we will receive the following error.

EXAMPLE:

$ man basic

No manual entry for basic

How do we know where our man files are located anyway? Simply use the manpath command.
Example:

$manpath

/usr/local/share/man:/usr/share/man/overrides:/usr/share/man
Now we need to determine where the specific man page belongs, have you ever wondered what the number in parentheses means next to the command in a man page? It denotes what type of command it is.  Here is a cheat sheet.
1.General commands
2.System calls
3.C library functions
4.Special files (usually devices, those found in /dev) and drivers
5.File formats and conventions
6.Games and screensavers
7.Miscellanea
8.System administration commands and daemons
So let’s go ahead and put basic in the man1 folder, change the owner to the root user and the root group.

First cd to ~\Downloads
Then let’s move the file.

Example:

$ mv man/basic 1 /usr/share/man/man1
$ sudo chown root:root /usr/share/man/man1/basic.1

Now let’ test.

$ man basic

The following screen should now be displayed.

We are now finished installing BASIC. You can now delete the files from your Downloads directory if you wish.
We are however not done with this tutorial! Why go to all this trouble, just to install a programming language, if we are not going to use it to write programs?

So let’s take the number guessing game from the Commodore Users Guide again and see how it works in Chipmunk Basic!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You can either enter the program from within Chipmunk BASIC, by entering basic at a prompt.

$ basic

 

 

 

Or you can enter the program in any text editor, such as vi, or nano.  Like this.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So go ahead and load a text editor of your choice. Then have fun typing in the below program!

1 rem  **************************************************************************
2 rem  *      Guess Random Number                                                        *
3 rem  * Originally Published In The 1982 Commodore 64 Users Guide *
4 rem  * Converted to Chipmunk Basic By: Brent Hendricks                   *
5 rem  * Used for a programming demo for installing Chipmunk BASIC *
6 rem  * on CentOS Linux 7, March 12 2016.                                          *
7 rem  * BASIC program released into the public domain.                      *
8 rem  * Article text is copyright Brent’s World.  Reproduction                *
9 rem  * in part of in whole may be done only with permission from       *
10 rem * the author.                                                                                *
11 rem *                                                                                                  *
12 rem * Please visit Brent’s World “An American Expat Living In         *
13 rem * South Korea, for this and other great articles.                         *
14 rem * www.catracing.org/hendrb                                                       *
15 rem ************************************************************************
20 clear
22 cls
23 gosub 120
25 input “Enter Upper Limit For Guess. “,li
30 nm = rnd(li)+1
35  cn = 0
40 print “OK, I’ve got the number.” : print
50 input “What is your guess? “,gu
55 cn = cn+1
60 if gu > nm then print “Nope! My number is lower!” : print : goto 50
70 if gu < nm then print “Nope! My number is higher!” : print : goto 50
80 print “GREAT!! You got my number!”
85 print “In Only “;cn;”guesses.” : print
90 print “Do you want to try another? “;an$
92 get an$ : if an$ = “” then 90
95 if an$ = “Y” or an$ = “YES” or an$ = “y” or an$ = “yes” then 22
110 end
120 print “**************************************************************************”
122 print “*                   Guess Random Number                                           *”
123 print “* Originally Published In The 1982 Commodore 64 Users Guide *”
124 print “* Converted to Chipmunk Basic By: Brent Hendricks.                  *”
125 print “* Used for a programming demo for installing Chipmunk BASIC *”
126 print “* on CentOS Linux 7, March 12 2016.                                         *”
127 print “* BASIC program released into the public domain.                      *”
128 print “* Article text is copyright Brent’s World.  Reproduction                *”
129 print “* in part of in whole may be done only with permission from       *”
130 print “* the author.                                                                                 *”
140 print “*                                                                                                   *”
150 print “* Please visit Brent’s World. An American Expat Living In          *”
160 print “* South Korea, for this and other great articles.                          *”
170 print “* www.catracing.org/hendrb                                                        *”
180 print “**************************************************************”*********”
200 return

I hope you enjoyed the blog, and that you will enjoy Chipmunk BASIC.  Please continue to come back for more great articles from Brent’s World.

Some of the most popular posts on my blog have been my BASH scripting tutorials.  I am not sure if anyone is actually typing them in and using them, but they do come to read them.  One of the burdens of having successful posts, especially dealing with programing, is you feel compelled to come back and follow up on them.

So while reading about  “20 Funny Commands of Linux or Linux is Fun in Terminal” on Techmint ( http://www.tecmint.com/20-funny-commands-of-linux-or-linux-is-fun-in-terminal/ ). I stumbled upon ‘cowsay’  amd had the wild idea that it would make a great upgrade  to my Random Quote script!

First, let’s start off with the simple question.  What is Cowsay?  Cowsay is a pearl script that will take text and output it inside a cow’s cartoon speech bubble drawn with ASCII characters.  Like This.
Now I know at this point there is a NIX guru out there jumping up and down, wanting to tell me that there is no need to modify my code at all, and this exercise is a waste of time, I could simply pipe the output of RandQuote to cowsay and be done with it.  While on one hand this person would be correct, however there are 2 reasons to press on.  The first being that due to the output being centered by the BASH Script, the output looks funny (Extra Spaces), second I want to be able to demonstrate how to write a BASH script that uses command line arguments.  So get a fresh cup of coffee, pull up your chair, and stay awhile.

The first thing we need to do is actually download and install the cowsay script, if you are running Linux in a GUI, simply go to the following URL ( http://www.melvilletheatre.com/articles/el7/cowsay-3.03-14.el7.centos.noarch.rpm ) to download the file.

If you are operating your system from the console or from a terminal you will need to use the wget command.

If it is not installed use sudo yum install wget first, then copy the url above, then cd to your Downloads directory. Ie ~/Downloads.  If you do not have a downloads directory you can either use /tmp (Though this is not considered best practice), or you can create the directory with the mkdir command.  Anyways.  Getting back on track, once you are sure your directory is set to the place you want to download cowsay to.
Copy the url above and enter sudo wget <PASTE>, you should end up with
$sudo wget http://www.melvilletheatre.com/articles/el7/cowsay-3.03-14.el7.centos.noarch.rpm .

Once cowsay has been downloaded, we next need to install it using rpm.  As we are still in the directory where cowsay was downloaded, simply perform an ls, and select and copy the filename,  cowsay-3.03-14.el7.centos.noarch.rpm .  Now issue the command
sudo rpm rpm –ivh cowsay-3.03-14.el7.centos.noarch.rpm . That’s it!  You now have cowsay installed.  Now comes the hard part. Now we have to modify randquote to incorporate cowsay, hence making it v1.1.

Lets test cowsay to make sure it is installed and working properly, at your shell prompt $ enter cowsay “The Quick Brown Fox Jumped Over The Lazy Dog.” If everything installed correctly, you should be presented with the screen below.

Now let’s go ahead and actually add the necessary lines to randqoute.sh, if you actually have the script installed and running on your system, let’s put it someplace where we can work on it, and not break the actual running copy.  The documentation called for the script to run from /opt/randquote, and we will place a copy in a folder called dev under your home folder.  If dev does not exist lets create it.  At a shell prompt type $ mkdir ~/dev <ENTER>
If you perform a ls of ~/ you should see dev listed.

Lets perform the actual copy.  So again at your shell prompt, type.$ sudo cp /opt/randquote/randquote.sh ~/dev/randquote_v1.1.sh <ENTER>

This will copy the file with the new filename randquote1.1.sh so we can easily differentiate between the two versions.  We will also most likely need to change owners so we can edit the file without having to use SUDO all the time.
$ chown <USERNAME> : <GROUP> ~/dev/randquote_v1.1.sh <ENTER>

Let us now go into NANO, and edit the script.

$ nano ~/dev/randquote_v1.1.sh

Add the following under the copyright message, <CR> Denotes Carriage Return.
#
# RandQuote v1.1 (C)22NOV2015 by Brent Hendricks
# Added the ability to display quotes through cowsay.
# cowsay is writen by Tomy Monroe (tomy@nog.net)
<CR>
COWSAY=0
<CR>
## Get Options
<CR>
while getopts “c” OPTION
do
          case $OPTION in
          c)
          COWSAY=1
          ;;
          esac
done
<CR>

Now cursor down to ## Read Quote from Quote file

After sed -n “${RECORD},+5p” $QUOTATIONS > $TEMP_QUOTATION

Highlight and cut sed -e :a -e “s/^.\{1,${TERMWIDE}\}$/ &/;ta” -e ‘s/\( *\)\1/\1/’ $TEMP_$

Then add the following.

<CR>
if [ $COWSAY -eq 0 ]
then
Paste the line you cut from above. ‘sed -e :a -e “s/^.\{1,${TERMWIDE}\}$/ &/;ta” -e ‘s/\( *\)\1/\1/’ $TEMP_$’
else
cat “${TEMP_QUOTATION}” | cowsay
fi

The rest of the file remains untouched.  The entire file listing should look like this.

1  #! /bin/bash
2
3  # BASH script to display RANDOM QUOTE and center text depending on terminal width.
4  # BASH script and quotations taken from CNET Amiga 2 AREXX PFILE
5  # AMIGA Version Copyright 1992 Jim Selleck and Beverly James Products
6  #
7  # BASH Script (C)24MAY2015 by Brent Hendricks
8  # Script and accompaning BLOG article (C) 2015 Brent Hendricks
9  # Script and quotes are public domain, the accompaning BLOG may only be
used with permission
10  # Contact brent.hendricks@catracing.org if you wish to republish the article.
11  # Please visit Brent’s World @ www.catracing.org\hendrb
12  #
13  # RandQuote v1.1 (C)22NOV2015 by Brent Hendricks
14  # Added the ability to display quotes through cowsay.
15  # cowsay is writen by Tomy Monroe (tomy@nog.net)
16
17  COWSAY=0
18
19  ## Get Options
20
21  while getopts “c” OPTION
22          do
23                  case $OPTION in
24                    c)
25                          COWSAY=1
26                          ;;
27                  esac
28  done
29
30  ## Get Terminal Width
31  TERMWIDE=”$(tput cols)”
32  ((TERMWIDE = TERMWIDE -3))
33
34  ## Set file path
35  QUOTATIONS=/opt/randquote/quotations
36  TEMP_QUOTATION=/tmp/temp_quotation
37
38  ## Get number of quotations
39  QUOTES=”$(cat $QUOTATIONS | wc -l)”
40  ((QUOTES = QUOTES / 5))
41
42  ## Pick a record
43
44  RECORD=$(($RANDOM % $QUOTES * 5))
45
46  ## Read Quote from Quote file
47  sed -n “${RECORD},+5p” $QUOTATIONS > $TEMP_QUOTATION
48
49  if [ $COWSAY -eq 0 ]
50  then
51          sed -e :a -e “s/^.\{1,${TERMWIDE}\}$/ &/;ta” -e ‘s/\( *\)\1/\1/’
$TEMP_QUOTATION
52  else
53          cat “${TEMP_QUOTATION}” | cowsay
54  fi
55
56  ## Remove TEMP_QUOTATION scratch file
57  # rm -f “${TEMP_QUOTATION}”
58 exit 0
We should now be able to test version 1.1.  make sure you are in the directory where v1.1 resides and at a shell prompt enter.

$ ./randquote_v1.1.sh –c

If all worked out right in the end, you should see.

Let’s also do a quick test to determine if you can also generate the random quote without the output being piped through cowsay.

At the shell prompt execute randquote without the -c option, like this.

$ ./randquote_v1.1.sh

You should then only see the normal randquote output.

Once everything is tested me can replace randquote with v1.1

At the shell prompt, let us first rename the original randquote so we retain a backup copy. To do this we use the move (mv) command.

$ sudo mv /opt/randquote/randquote /opt/randquote/randquote_v1.0 <ENTER>

Now we move randquote_v1.1 from our dev directory, renaming it randquote. (Unless you want to keep the _v1.1 filename and change your login scripts.

$ sudo mv ~/dev/randquote_v1.1 /opt/randquote/randquote

We are now finished, if you have entered randquote for the first time, you will also need to download the quotations file attachment. https://www.catracing.org/hendrb/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/quotations.txt

I would like to thank the following people whose blog’s helped immensley with writing version 1.1

First I would like to thank Tomy Monroe who without cowsay, version 1.1 would not be possible.

Second I would like to thank Avishek Kumar for writing the blog 20 Funny Commands of Linux or Linux is Fun in Terminal, http://www.tecmint.com/20-funny-commands-of-linux-or-linux-is-fun-in-terminal/ . Who gave me the original idea.

Last but not least, for showing me the light regarding the getopts statement, this wonderful blog tutorial by rsalveti, Bash: Parsing arguments with ‘getopts’ https://rsalveti.wordpress.com/2007/04/03/bash-parsing-arguments-with-getopts/

I hope you enjoyed the blog, and please visit our forums, register and discuss this script, other Linux or technical topics, by visiting. www.catracing.org/hendrb/forums