The available built-in commands are:

run (aliases: execute, system). (default)

Execute a single command on the command line shell.

It can take the following qualifiers

ui

output will not be captured, but will be shown on the screen immediately - this allows the user to interact with the command. This may be necessary when the command expects input from the user. For example the dos command “dir /p” will pause after each screen, without ui qualifier the script would appear to hang (as the message to press any key would not be displayed).

nocheck

Do not check the return value. Default is to raise an exception if the return value is not 0 (success)

echo

Output is echo’ed to the terminal window after the process has finished executing.

dirname

Return the directory (or parent directory for a directory) of the path passed in.

filename (aliases basename)

Return the filename (or directory name for a directory) of the path passed in.

abspath

Return the absolute path of the file.

count

exists (aliases exist)

check if the path (file or directory) exists or not. If the path exists - then it returns true. example:

# if there is machine specific configuration then load it
- if exists <shell.computername>.bb:
    - include <shell.computername>.bb

notexists (aliases notexist)

check if the path (file or directory) exists or not. If the path does not exist - then it returns true. This can be useful if you want to raise an error becuase one or more files does not exist.

escapenewlines (aliases escape_newlines)

r and n characters in the input will be replaced with \r and \n respectively.

replace

Allows you to replace text in a string

Usage:

replace text to search in {*text to find*} {*replace with*}

Example:

# get the contents of the text file
- ser serverlocation = http://code.google.com/p/betterbatch/
- set mail_contents = {{{ type email_template.txt }}}

# replace the text 'SERVERLOCATION' in the email templaet
# with 'http://code.google.com/p/betterbatch/'
- echo {{{replace <mail_contents> {*SERVERLOCATION*} {*<serverlocation>*} }}}

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