DtkshDemos is a miscellaneous collection of freeware demos written in the Desktop Korn Shell, dtksh.
dtksh is an X11 enabled version of the new Korn shell (ksh93). It is a handy language for the occasional simple GUI. Unfortunately it seems that very few people use it, and so very few sample scripts can be found on the Internet (I found less than a dozen unique scripts). I hope this small collection helps.

Warning: Currently these are "demos" not "tools". dtksh does not appear well maintained across different OSes, so often these scripts will run for a minute and then freeze. If dtksh were to be fixed at some point in the future, this website may be renamed "dtkshtools".

Note: The code is based on the dtksh and X11 man pages, I has seen very little code that actually used XmDrawingArea for plotting. You may find some official examples in a path such as /usr/dt/share/examples/dtksh - depending on your OS.

Contents and Downloads

These have been designed to display in 24-bit colour.
• xvmstat an X11 version of vmstat.
• xplot a simple X11 plotter. Reads a list of numbers from STDIN and plots them.
• xworldclock a digital clock with times from around the world.
• xpong a demo of a game in dtksh.
• xlinesdemo a simple demonstration of X11 graphics. Random lines.
• xlinedemo a simple X11 demo of a moving line.
• xcolourdemo a simple X11 demo of the available colours.

Operating Systems

These programs require dtksh. They has been tested on Solaris, but they will probably work fine on HPUX, AIX and wherever else dtksh is available.

Screenshots

The following are short demonstrations for each of the programs.



xvmstat - is a tool to plot the output of vmstat. Configurables include size and colour.


$ ./xvmstat -x 400 -y 450







xplot - is a tool to plot a list of numbers read from STDIN. The idea was that whenever you are looking at a column of numbers (perhaps the output of a command or the contents of some log file), xplot could be used to graph them. Configurables include field, delimiter, size and colour.

In this example we run vmstat with a one second interval, then pipe this into xplot and take the 21st field "-f 20" and plot it. The maximum is 100 "-hi 100", and a title is set using "-t sys",


$ vmstat 1 kthr memory page disk faults cpu r b w swap free re mf pi po fr de sr dd dd f0 s3 in sy cs us sy id 0 0 0 585144 88384 1 7 3 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 421 853 242 2 1 98 0 0 0 539800 50024 0 7 0 0 0 0 0 0 4 0 0 459 990 318 3 0 97 0 0 0 539800 50024 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 667 1334 459 1 3 96 ^C $ $ vmstat 1 | xplot -f 20 -hi 100 -t sys




In this example we run netstat -i 1 to watch inbound packets. The first field is then plotted using xplot "-f 0" with a line colour of green "-lc Green" and an x increment per point of 5 "-inc 5",


$ netstat -i 1 input hme0 output input (Total) output packets errs packets errs colls packets errs packets errs colls 2577891 0 3127581 0 0 4302512 0 4852202 0 0 106 0 74 0 0 112 0 80 0 0 85 0 58 0 0 91 0 64 0 0 64 0 44 0 0 70 0 50 0 0 ^C $ $ netstat -i 1 | tail +4 | xplot -f 0 -inc 5







xworldclock - is a tool to print times from around the world. Configurables include size and colour.


$ ./xworldclock







xpong - is a demo of a game in dtksh. 1 or 2 player. (I wrote this to see how well it would perform)...


$ ./xpong







xlinesdemo - is a simple demo of the X11 capabilities. A good place to start if you are learning dtksh.


$ ./xlinesdemo