GameShell (gsh) is the outcome of thinking how to best teach the basics (and slightly more) of using a shell to first year students at the université Savoie Mont Blanc.

The original idea, due to Rodolphe Lepigre, was to run a standard bash session with an appropriate configuration file that defined "missions" which would be "checked" in order to advance in the game.

Here is the result...

Do not hesitate to send us you remarks, questions or suggestions about GameShell. We are particularly interested in any new mission you might create!

GameShell released under the GPLv3

GameShell is currently undergoing heavy development. The current version hasn't been field tested by students. Don't hesitate to open issues on bug or suggestions.

• Pierre Hyvernat
• Rodolphe Lepigre

Pierre Hyvernat

http://www.lama.univ-smb.fr/~hyvernat

pierre.hyvernat@univ-smb.fr

GameShell should (??) work on any standard Linux system. On Debian/Ubuntu, the only dependency (besides bash) required to play is the package gettext-base. awk is also required, but should be installed by default.

If you want create your own missions and translate them, you'll need the full gettext package as well.

If available, python3 is used to display ASCII-art boxes ("parchment") around some messages. If not, awk is used instead, but depending on your awk version, UTF-8 characters might cause glitches in alignements of borders. If that's a problem, install python3.

Some missions have additional dependencies. If they are not met, those missions are ignored. To run all the currently available missions, you need the following

• man (man-db package in Debian/Ubuntu)
• ps (procps package in Debian/Ubuntu)
• pstree (psmisc package in Debian/Ubuntu)
• nano (nano package in Debian/Ubuntu)
• tree (tree package in Debian/Ubuntu)
• cal (bsdmainutils package in Debian/Ubuntu)
• xeyes (x11-apps package in Debian/Ubuntu)
• python3 (python3 package in Debian/Ubuntu)

On a Debian / Ubuntu system, the following ensures you have everything you need to run GameShell without problems.

    $ sudo apt install gettext-base python3 man-db psmisc nano tree bsdmainutils x11-apps gettext

It should be possible to run GameShell on macOS, but we don't ourselves use macOS. Contact us if you have problems running GameShell and are willing to help us test it.

To install the dependencies, the easiest is probably to use the package manager homebrew :

    $ /usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"

and to install the dependencies with

    $ brew install nano pstree tree man-db

We haven't tested it a lot, but it should run on freeBSD once you install the dependencies:

    $ pkg install bash gettext pstree wget python3

It might be possible to run GameShell on Windows, if you have installed Cygwin.

We haven't tried but are interested in any feedback.

Download the archive and run the start.sh script:

$ rm -rf GameShell && mkdir GameShell && wget  https://api.github.com/repos/phyver/GameShell/tarball -O -  |  tar -xz -C GameShell --strip-components 1
$ ./GameShell/start.sh
...
...

If your tar version doesn't have the option --strip-components, use the following:

$ rm -rf phyver-GameShell-* && wget  https://api.github.com/repos/phyver/GameShell/tarball -O -  |  tar -xz
$ ./phyver-GameShell-*/start.sh
...
...

First clone the repository, and run the start.sh script

$ git clone https://github.com/phyver/GameShell.git
$ ./GameShell/start.sh
...
...

That's the easiest to distribute GameShell to a group of students. Once you've cloned the repository, create an executable archive with the archive.sh script:

$ cd GameShell
$ ./utils/archive.sh
copy missions
01_cd_1  -->  000001_cd_1
...
...
generating '.mo' files
removing 'auto.sh' scripts
removing unnecessary (_*.sh, Makefile) files
setting admin password
setting default GameShell mode
creating archive
creating self-extracting archive
removing tgz archive
removing temporary directory
$ ls
... GameShell.sh ...

The GameShell.sh file contains an instance of GameShell that you can easily copy to any other computer. To run it, you can either use

$ ./GameShell.sh

or

$ bash ./GameShell.sh

The idea behind GameShell is to be "as close as possible" to a standard shell session. For that reason, I use it on "standard" Linux computers, or on a virtual machine running Linux.

If you prefer, you can run it from a Docker image. The Dockerfile included in the repository will create a Docker image with all the dependencies.

• create the image (from the GameShell repository)

    $ docker build -t gsh .
  

• run the image, if you have an X server:

    $ host +"local:docker@" &&    \
      docker run -it              \
         -e DISPLAY=${DISPLAY} -v /tmp/.X11-unix:/tmp/.X11-unix \
         gsh
  

• run the image, without an X server:

    $ docker run -it gsh
  

GameShell is just a bash session with additional commands. You can run them with the gsh command:

• gsh help : show a list of available commands
• gsh goal : show the goal of the current mission
• gsh check : check if the current mission has been completed
• gsh reset : reset the current mission

Some other commands exist but shouldn't be necessary in a standard game. You can get the full list with

• gsh HELP : show a full list of gsh commands

Those commands are explained in details in the file doc/gameshell.md.

Creating new missions is explained in a dedicated file doc/missions.md.

• Pierre Hyvernat
• Rodolphe Lepigre
• Christophe Raffalli
• Xavier Provencal
• Clovis Eberhart
• Sébastien Tavenas
• Tiemen Duvillard

• All my students who discovered many bugs in the early versions
• Joan Stark, who designed hundreds of ASCII-art pieces in the late 90'. Most of the ASCII-art you encounter in GameShell are due to her. (That's the meaning of the "jgs" initials you'll see there.)

GameShell released under the GPLv3

Please link to this repository if you use GameShell.