Kiobashin. Stupid kioslaves for the masses.

What is kiobashin? You are probably a KDE linux user, if you are reading this. And probably you already know that a kioslave is something handles a virtual file system under KDE. Well. I like KDE very much and I wanted to write something using KDevelop. After one or two minutes I realized that KDE programming is really easy and I decided to write something as stupid as cool. Here you are kiobashin, which is a Kio-slave that allow you to write your personal kioslave... using plain bashscripts. What is surprising is that it was written in about 4 hours. And I'm not a C++ programmer. How to get Kiobashin? Well. Download the sources here: kiobashin.kdevelop-0.1.tar.gz What kind of license? Nothing. Take it and do what you want. Untar and do the classical ./configure && make && make install as root. That's all. Create a directory called kiobashin in your home directory and copy the bashscripts you found under the kiobashin-scripts folders. End of the installation. How to use Kiobashin? Open konqueror and go to kiobashin:/. There are all the avaible scripts shown as folders. Simply click on one of these and happy browsing! Let's try the "kwedshin.sh" script. Click the script's folder. remix.kwed.org is a very nice MP3 site. It has lotsa of Commodore 64 remixes... and is one of my favourite sites. Well... let's see how I've "kiobashined©" the homepage... Hey! Seems like the "kwedshin.sh" folder contains some MP3s organized by author! ;) Saying the truth these MP3s aren't downloaded. The homepage was a bit grepped and reformatted by a script and the content was sent to kiobashin. However looks like a well organized folder! How to listen the MP3s? Let's simply copy the MP3s like any file on the desktop, on a folder or directly on your MP3 player! LOOL! Don't try to launch directly these files... Kiobashin is still a bit buggy... :) How it works? Really simple. The kiobashin root shows all your *.sh scripts in your "kiobashin" directory in your home. When you "go into" a kiobashin script, it runs the script and parses the output. How? yourscript.sh *dir [subpath] Where subpath are all the current path levels passed as parameters. For example: yourscript.sh *dir Will be called when you are at kiobashin://yourscript.sh/. yourscript.sh *dir "folder 1" "subfolder 3" Will be called when you are at kiobashin://yourscript.sh/folder 1/subfolder 3. When the script is called, it must return some stuff that descripts the virtual directory in this way: 1. If you want a folder simply echo a "*" with the folder name. *This is the folder name 2. If you want a file, echo a "." with the file name... .filename.mp3 ...and another line that describes the file... 300*audio/mpeg3 ...that means an MP3 that is 300K big. That's all for directory listing. You can test directly your script from the command line... kes@kesiev:~/kiobashin$ bash kwedshin.sh *dir *Andreas Bauernfeind *Antony Crowther (Ratt) *Ben Daglish *Chris Hülsbeck *David Whittaker *Eddie Svärd (Hank) *Edwin van Santen *Ian W. Crabtree *Jeroen Tel - Maniacs of Noise *Johan Åstrand (Zyron) *John A. Fitzpatrick *Jonathan Dunn *Juha-Matti Hilpinen (AMJ) *Kai Walter (PVCF) *Keith Miller *Keith Tinman *Kris Hatlelid *Mark Cooksey *Mark Waldaukat (Heinmukk) *Markus Schneider *Martin Galway *Matt Gray *Michael Hendriks *Nick Scarim *Richard Joseph *Rob Hubbard *Rob Hubbard & Jori Olkkonen *Sami Seppä (Rock) *Shaun Southern *Thomas E. Petersen (Laxity) *Tim & Geoff Follin *Tim Follin *Unknown *Wojciech Radziejewski (Shogoon) kes@kesiev:~/kiobashin$ bash kwedshin.sh *dir "Edwin van Santen" .Putzi - PCW-tune 88 'Engel-mix'.mp3 0*audio/mpeg3 kes@kesiev:~/kiobashin$ Really easy, isn't it? Well... now let's explain how kiobashin retrieve files. The kiobashin script is called with the first argument as *mime when the kioslave asks which type is your file. Usually is the same used when you are describing a file. For example, when the kioslave asks which mimetype is the file foo.mp3 into the virtual folder kiobashin://yourscript.sh/my Mp3s/misc/, kiobashin calls: yourscript.sh *mime "my Mp3s" "misc" "foo.mp3" it will return only the mime type... kes@kesiev:~/kiobashin$ bash yourscript.sh *mime "my Mp3s" "misc" "foo.mp3" audio/mpeg3 If kiobashin needs the real file, it will call the script using the *file second parameter. The real file must be simply cated from the script: it will be piped directly to the system. For example: if we have a virtual file called readme.txt into the folder kiobashin://yourscript.sh/virtual docs/more stuff/, kiobashin calls: yourscript.sh *file "virtual docs" "more stuff" "readme.txt" Running it from the command line, it will show the pure file. kes@kesiev:~/kiobashin$ bash yourscript.sh *file "virtual docs" "more stuff" "readme.txt" This is a virtual readme that isn't a real file on the hard disk! Clear? Look the test.sh kiobashin script for a clearer example. Why Kiobashin? Any particular reason. I just wanna know how hard should be write a virtual filesystem for KDE and now I'm impressed about how easy is. I've just expanded the example provided by KDevelop. And not too much! KDE is a really cool and easy enviroment and has a really well-organized structure. I think that lacks a more n00b-friendly code editor (cough cough... code autocompletion...) and an updated tutorial. Your Feedback! Some suggestions? A good tutorial for KDE application development? Two friendly words? Write @ kesiev@hotmail.com. I'll surely answer to you!