I just need to develop a menu based Administration tools in LINUX similar like SAM - HP and SMIT - AIX , should be in a position to work with tab and space bar and arrow keys , can any one suggest how to start...should i write a code in c language only or i can implement the same in shell script itself.


regds,
Jaikris

There's already yast2 for SuSE.. why do you want to reinvent the wheel?

I just need to develop a similar tool for RHEL .. this am doing as my MS dissertation work , can you pls guide me on this..

What is an "MS dissertation"?

Anyway assuming you want something with all the bells and whistles, as already suggested, you can start by looking at yast. Get the source and explore it (be careful to check its licence though).

Cheers,

Evo2.

just a guess but MS= master of science and of course the dissertation is the final step of earning a masters degree or doctorate degree
and yes i would start by looking at the source code of something like yast

for rhel / centos/fedora there is yumex

you could port all the fedora 13 Gnome/python2.6 tools from fedora over to the python2.5 of rhel5
or the kde4-qt4 gui tools to the rhel5 qt3 kde3.5

but yast on SUSE in nice ( although i like the terminal )

Ahh, where I'm from that would be an MSc.

I guessed that, but again where I'm from that would be a thesis.

Cheers,

Evo2.

I would suggest you try ncurses

http://tldp.org/HOWTO/NCURSES-Programming-HOWTO/

From where we can download the source code of yast .

Yast is a SUSE tool, so you should be able to get it from an OpenSUSE repository: GIYF.

Evo2.

There is also webmin

yes but his point is he wants to WRITE something for his project
and webmin is an web based interface, not a text based

there is also linuxconf
http://www.solucorp.qc.ca/linuxconf/
which is a horribly outdated text based configuration tool for linux systems, but could be a good starting point as to figure out how it does certain things since the source code is readily available

Hi freiza ,

Ya you are right , i just need to develop just a menu based admin tool .

LIke

sample .....................................
1 . Users & group
2> backup & recovery
3. LVM
4 . Networking
enter your choice.
............................................

like sam am not using tab / arrow keys for navigating am planning to use by number selection only ..

user wil be entering his choice .

for eg if he enter 1 .. again he will be promped for the users & group sub menu


as

1 .New user.
2.Modify existing user
enter your choice .

based on his input need to accept the details from user and need to process.



I dont know how to use arrow keys / tab keys for navihgating instead of asking enter your choice , pls anyone help me out ..

The challenge will be not to destroy some user configured data in the config file. You need to parse and update the files without overwriting them with your value. Otherwise it will not be usable in real life. The advantages of config file over user interface is the fine grained control without bloated interface. The Unix philosophy dict that everything should be a file and every application do one thing, but do it right. User interface based configuration tools have so far failed to gain traction on Unix/Linux because they lack the flexibility and completeness of a comprehensive and well documented config file.

About how to do it, forget C, it is not really good for parsing text. C++ or higher level languages are recommanded. Bash is fine for parsing, but it will be hard to manage the data you are working with, so the code will become a mess sooner than later. An object oriented String implementation is what I would use. I don't really like when languages implement it as a base type. For the menu, if you want to go command line, use ncurse or just pring text. If you want to go graphical, GTK2 or Qt4 are for you.