What is alloy?

alloy is a utility and paired library that creates a script meant to call many other scripts. It requires a special directory refered to as the alloy_root. This directory will have at minimum a /bin or a /hooks directory. The created script is known as the "handle".

From this point on, all absolute paths are considered to have the alloy_root as the root directory. IE the bin directory in the alloy_root will be shown as /bin.

If there is no executable /hooks/main file, when the handle is called it will operate in arg-command mode. The first argument to the handle will be used as a script name, and it will look in /bin for that script and will attempt to execute it. The script will recieve all remaining arguments.

There are two valid hooks, default and main. When no arguments are given, and there is no main hook, then the default hook will be run. When there is a main hook that is executable it will be run whenever the handle is called, and will recieve all the arguments.

Why?

There are two benefits to doing this. The first is simply to provide a clean way to collect a bunch of similar scripts together, these scripts don't need to be written in the same language, some can even be compiled binaries. The second purpose is to provide a simple means for those scripts to call each other, this is done with the . $_alloy command available to bash and xs scriptlets. This effectively solves the "bash scripts can't find their source path" problem.

The scriptlets can be written in multiple different languages, or could be compiled binaries if necessary.

Example

alloy ~/mroot ~/bin/handle where ~/mroot is a directory that contains the bin/ directory with the scriptlets you want to call with the handle. The alloy handle will be made. You can then run handle goat which will call ~/mroot/bin/goat with all the proper environment.

Terms

• handle: The program created by the alloy command
• scriptlet: An executable program or script in /bin or /sbin
• hook: An executable program in /hooks
• alloy_root: The directory provided when running the alloy command
• xs: A shell like bash
• bash: A shell like xs

Installation

Copy lib to /usr/lib/alloy, copy bin/* to a directory in your $PATH.

. $_alloy functions

bin

bin will call any scriptlets in bin as if the handle were called. Except it has no logic to call any hooks, it will just blindly call the scriptlet.

sbin

As bin except it will look in /sbin instead of /bin

lib

Will source each of the arguments in /lib. Thus lib a b c will source /lib/a, /lib/b, and /lib/c.

sudobin and sudosbin

As bin and sbin except will prefix them with sudo.