A-Shell for UNIX

Linux

A-Shell/Linux is a standard console-type application, typically accessed via telnet or ssh from a PC-based terminal emulator (such as our ATE). AM*, Wyse50 and VT320 emulations are specifically supported, although a generic Terminfo-based driver will provide rudimentary support for most other terminal types. This environment is probably the most similar to the AMOS environment, and provides the highest performance for disk-intensive applications with the highest number of users and the lowest overall cost. While A-Shell/Linux does not support X-style graphics, when connected to via our ATE terminal emulator, it supports the same GUI and other Windows-integration capabilities as A-Shell/Windows.

Although all Linux flavors share more commonalities than differences and A-Shell could certainly be made available for any of them, based on customer demand we have focused on the Red Hat Enterprise (RHEL) / CentOS distributions. We also provide a version specifically made for the Raspberry Pi running Rasbian.

For reasons of compatibility and simplicity, we distribute A-Shell/Linux in a CPIO package rather than the more Linux-typical RPM. The package name format (see Downloading below) is: ash-#.#.####.#-<distro>{-??}.bin where #.#.####.# is the A-Shell version,

<distro> will be el# (for RHEL# or CentOS#) or pi (Raspberry Pi). The optional -?? could be -efs (for the Encrypted File System) or -tw (for the Triad/Wrenchead catalog support). Files with an extension of .bin are full CPIO packages; those with an extension of -upd.tz are compress tar files containing just the main ashell executable (use tar -xvzf filespec to extract.)

AIX

A-Shell/AIX shares most of the attributes of A-Shell/Linux mentioned above, with the following differences/caveats:

  • A-Shell 6.2 and above require AIX 5.3 or above. Due to hardware/OS compatibility issues, we are no longer able to produce A-Shell for earlier versions of AIX.
  • The following features are not supported: Collections (ORDMAP, MLIST), TLS, HTTP, CRYPTO, DYNLIB, FastCGI, AXL, ASQL, EFS
  • Distribution files may end in .Z meaning they are compressed; start by using uncompress.

Downloading

For information on file names, version identification and download options, see the UNIX Downloads page in the A-Shell Reference.

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