Installing Hyperkey

Using Hyperkey without installing

  • Hyperkey works fine without ever being installed. It can be launched at any time by double-clicking on the 'start_hyperkey.bat' icon within its main folder.
  • This method of using Hyperkey can be very handy, because it is very portable. For example, Hyperkey can be added to a small USB drive, and carried anywhere. Everything that Hyperkey needs is contained in a single folder, including all of the backups and archives.
  • The Hyperkey folder including its archives can be copied to any desired location, and will work the same way in the new location.

Why install Hyperkey?

  • Installing Hyperkey makes sense when you have a central server such as a network-attached-storage (NAS) device, or for computers where you would be using the shortcut, backup or retrieval capabilities of Hyperkey frequently.
  • When installed, Hyperkey can share resources across a LAN, is available in any shell, and can be used in conjunction with other shell scripts.

Installing Hyperkey

  • Hyperkey must be installed manually under Linux, due to the large number of different OS versions, desktop versions and shell versions available.
  • The instructions below work for installing in CentOS using a Bash shell. Installation for other configurations is not provided at this time, but should be fairly straightforward for anyone familiar with Linux.
    1. If not already logged in as 'root', enter 'su' in the command shell followed by the root password to gain 'superuser' privileges.
    2. Copy the Hyperkey folder to where you wish to have it installed. For example, it could be copied to '/usr/bin/Hyperkey'.
    3. Create a starting Hyperkey init file and database by copying the sample files from the Hyperkey install directory to your home directory.

      For example, if you installed Hyperkey in /usr/bin/Hyperkey:

      • cd /usr/bin/Hyperkey
        cp _hkey_init.txt ~/.
        cp -rfp hkeydb ~/.

    4. Set the PATH environment variable in your shell's profile file. For recent releases of Bash, this file will be "~/.bash_profile" in your home directory.

      Append the PATH environment variable with the bin subdirectory of the location where you put the Hyperkey files.

      For example if Hyperkey were installed in /usr/bin/Hyperkey, then the PATH change might go from:

      • PATH=$PATH:$HOME/bin

      to:

      • PATH=$PATH:$HOME/bin:/usr/bin/Hyperkey/bin

    5. If you are using Bash, adding the following aliases to the init file "~/.bashrc" in your home directory can make Hyperkey much easier to use:

      • alias call='source'
        alias 2='source 2'
        alias s='source s'
        alias g='source g'
        alias gobak='source gobak'
        alias goinc='source goinc'
        alias golog='source golog'
        alias sal='source sal'

      These aliases allow the commands to be able to change the current directory of the current shell. Without them, the commands that do things will still work, but the directory of the shell will remain at the same location.

      This is because in Unix-based systems, shell commands execute in a separate sub-shell, and environment changes do not affect the calling shell. The Bash 'source' command overrides this behavior, and runs the commands in the current shell instead of a sub-shell.

      For example, without the alias, the 's' command will open a window to the directory specified by its key, but will not change the current directory of the shell. The '2' command will appear to have no effect at all because its only action is to change the directory of the (sub-)shell.

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