[GTALUG] Practical Use of GRUB's DSL: With the examples inexplicably left out of the GRUB documentation

Giles Orr gilesorr at gmail.com
Tue Oct 16 09:16:19 EDT 2018


I've finally released a document I've been working on for a while:

"Practical Use of GRUB's DSL: With the examples inexplicably left out of
the GRUB documentation" ( https://www.gilesorr.com/grubdsl/ )

Daniel did the editing, and set me on this path in the first place with his
own interest in GRUB.  The GRUB DSL is somewhat similar to an older version
of a Linux shell, but documentation of its functionality online is poor to
non-existent.  Don't get me wrong: GRUB has a lot of documentation of
individual commands, but how you can assemble them into useful scripts is
barely documented at all.  (Yup, its an uncommon application realm.)  My
greatest frustration with GRUB's DSL is the lack of redirection and pipes
(I understand why they're not there - but it would be nice to have them).

I hope this is helpful to someone!

     -----

As a technical side note, I learned the basics of LaTeX in an attempt to
create this document in that language (I'd been wanting to learn it for
years).  LaTeX is supposed to be able to generate not only PostScript and
PDF, but also HTML.  But it turns out the HTML generator isn't nearly as
well maintained as the PDF generator, and in the end I could find no way to
implement my code examples in such a way that the HTML generator wouldn't
fail on them.  I also found the language unnecessarily complex for what I
was trying to achieve and ultimately switched to raw HTML (which you see
above).  LaTeX may have been a poor choice.  :-)

-- 
Giles
https://www.gilesorr.com/
gilesorr at gmail.com
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