pacron

PACman Run ON is a basic wrapper for Arch Linux's pacman to provide simple hooks for other scripts and commands. It's loosely modeled off of cron, the GNU/Linux utility, in which a "tab" file controls when commands are run.

What does it do?

pacron can automate a number things for you. Here's some highlights:

• Check and display recent Arch Linux news before performing a full system upgrade (-Su, -Syu, etc).
• After performing a system upgrade, upgrade all vim plugins.
• If the pacman mirrorlist is updated, generate one using Reflector.
• If the Linux kernel is updated, offer to reboot the system. Useful if a kernel update is buried in a long list of upgradable packages.

Can it do more?

You bet! If you'd like to suggest a hook, use the issue tracker. If you have a hook you'd like to share, open a pull request!

Features

• Wraps pacman and also packer
• Automatically runs scripts before or after pacman/packer executes
• Uses bash pattern matching on options passed to pacman/packer to choose which commands to run

The pacrontab

# ~/.config/pacron/pacrontab: table for pacron
# PATTERN   after/before    PATH
-S*u*       before          ~/.config/pacron/hooks/archnews.py
-S*u*       after           vim -c 'PluginUpdate' -c 'qa!'

Each row of the pacrontab is made up of whitespace separated columns. The first column of each row is the option pattern to run on. The second column is either 'before' or 'after', indicating whether the command is run before or after pacman/packer executes. The third column and beyond is the commands/script and arguments to run.

Quick Setup

cd && git clone https://github.com/kevlar1818/pacron .pacron-git
mkdir -p ~/.config
cp -a .pacron-git/config/pacron ~/.config/pacron

Usage

usage: pacron [options]

PACman Run ON, the pacman hook wrapper | www.github.com/kevlar1818/pacron

Copyright 2014 Kevin Hanselman (See LICENSE or source)

Options:
  -h		show this help text and exit
  -e		edit ~/.config/pacron/pacrontab