rxvt sh under MSWin

[ted]

The rxvt shell window (launched by clicking on the rxvt sh icon in the NEURON Program Group) is pretty slick--it gives MSWin users access to a few very nice utilities. It's nowhere near as complete as you'd get by installing cygwin, or running UNIX/Linux/OS X, but even a few nice features and utilities is better than what Microsoft gives you.

So open an rxvt window, then at the command line type
pwd
and you'll get this response:
/cygdrive/c

ls
will show all the stuff at the root of c:

ls d:
or
ls /cygdrive/d
shows all the stuff at the root of d:

Tab completion works, which saves a lot of typing when doing cd or typing a long file name.

ls /cygdrive/c/nrn62/bin
shows all the executables that come with NEURON. Notice that these include
find
grep
sed
which can be very helpful indeed.

cd /cygdrive/d
pwd
and you get
/cygdrive/d

grep load_file *hoc
shows all the files in the current directory that contain load_file

modlunit filename.hoc
checks filename.hoc for consistent units.

mknrndll
compiles the mod files in the current directory and generates a dll.

mknrndll 2>errmsg.txt
captures stderr to errmsg.txt (after all, this is a bash shell), so you can review it later. Very helpful when you are trying to see if any of your mod files are not threadsafe.

nrniv -
starts NEURON sans its GUI, at which point entering the command
em
at the oc> prompt puts you in MicroEMACS (which is excellent if you're a MicroEMACS fan).

For an example of how to use the shell to execute batch runs, see
Automating tasks: -c "statement" and batch runs
http://www.neuron.yale.edu/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=1747