CERN Accelerating science

Common HEP UNIX Environment: HEPiX Shells

  Arnaud Taddei CN/DCI (for the HEPiX Shells Scripts Working Group)

In the previous issue of CNL (CNL 220) we published an article (2.3 in Desktop Computing) introducing the Common HEP UNIX Environment. Since then a lot of work had been done and a new version had been introduced in production recently on ASIS at CERN.

This new version also has a new HEPiX X11 environment, part which is described in the following article of this newsletter ().

As well as a full internal reorganisation of the scripts to have a cleaner architecture, we took the opportunity to add the following features

• improvements in the behaviour of the scripts in BATCH mode,
• some new options such as:
  • an option to be warned about AFS token expiration if you are an AFS user (this exists for the two recommended shells tcsh and zsh ),
  • an option to specify from which group you want to get customisation files if you belong to several groups,
  • an option to put all your portable scripts in a dedicated directory in your Home directory;

• optimisation of the scripts using some preprocessing tools which produce optimised target programs for each supported platform,
• porting of the shell scripts to new platforms including AIX4, HP-UX10, Digital UNIX (OSF1) 3.2,
• improvements in the behaviour and documentation of the uco command which is the "reset button" you can use when your environment is in an unknown state.

A more complete list of features is given at:

http://wwwinfo.cern.ch/

hepix/wg/scripts/doc/version/Version.html

We have attempted to provide a reasonable working default while leaving the scripts customisable by system and/or group administrators if they want to offer a service which is exactly tailored to the needs of the users they support.

Users can consult a User Guide and system administrators can consult a System Administrators Guide. Both guides are accessible at:

http://wwwinfo.cern.ch/hepix/wg/scripts/www/

These scripts are now more and more popular and used at many sites: CERN, DESY Hamburg, DESY Zeuthen, Pisa, RAL, etc. At CERN all the PLUS and workgroup services are using them now. Existing experiments are now using HEPiX on a wider scale.