poctbsh - a simple GUI to make a programmers life easier

Today i was working on poctbsh (Pipers Open Cobol Tool Box SHell), a simple GUI which should help programmers to manage their source codes and copy books, compile them, run the programs, view the output and so on.

This GUI is something you can, but must not use, the precompiler itself works fine without the GUI, so you will be able to use it in any way you want.

But the GUI IMO makes life easier, thats the reason why i am working on it ;)

Okay, a few screenies:

The main screen, right now you have only 2 options, Program Development and to quit the GUI.

More to come soon.

The screen for Program Development.

Here you choose the "current program", the one you want to work on.

Then you can edit the *.scb source code, the input for the MySql precompiler, edit the shellscript to run the program, compile the program with the precompiler and the OpenCobol compiler.

So you can simply type "p ENTER-key", "1 ENTER-key" to set the current program, "3 ENTER-key" to edit the current program, the *.scb file with the editor of your choice, defined in the poctbsh.cfg file, "5 ENTER-key" to compile it, "6 ENTER-key" to run the corresponding shell script and so on.

This evening i was already able to edit and compile an example program. And to do that, the precompiler got a new option now, -I, to specify the folder, where the copybooks are stored.

poctbsh expects a given folder structure in your $HOME directory.

It is stored in poctbsh.dat and looks like this

bin/ <== binary files like the precompiler itself + your compilled programs
copybooks/  <== you guess it
output/ <== output of compiles, shell scripts
poctbsh.cfg <== this is the config file for poctbsh, which you can edit to your needs
sh/ <== shell scripts to run your COBOL programs
source/ <== where the COBOL *.scb source is stored
system/ <== system stuff
templates/ <== templates for compiling programs and such
tmp/<== temporary stuff

As i said, it is not mandatory that you are using this GUI, but it would make your job as a programmer easier.

You can still use the precompiler without this GUI.