Clearing the screen and Julia's exploratory tools (equivalent of Python's dir function)

[Nafiul Islam]

Hi (again)!

Hopefully a (slightly) more intelligent question this time. I've been successfully able to run shell commands from Julia through Base.run, and the first thing I did was clear the screen:

julia> Base.run(`clear`)

However, I wanted to ask, if there was an inbuilt function that does this. Making one yourself is trivial of course:

julia> f() = Base.run(`clear`)

f (generic function with 1 method)

But creating one for each session is rather annoying.

Second question is that I'm looking for something like Python's dir function:

In [3]: import os

In [4]: dir(os)

Out[4]:

['EX_CANTCREAT',

 'EX_CONFIG',

 'EX_DATAERR',

 'EX_IOERR',

 ....

 ....

 ....

 'wait',

 'wait3',

 'wait4',

 'waitpid',

 'walk',

 'write']

In essence, it gives you a list of all the objects/functions that are available to that package. Now, I've taken a look at the help function in Julia, and its helpful on a function, it can give you information about a function that you know exist:

julia> help(run)

Base.run(command)

   Run a command object, constructed with backticks. Throws an error

   if anything goes wrong, including the process exiting with a non-

   zero status.

However, it is Base that has this function. Is there a tool like dir that I can leverage to explore Julia?

[Kevin Squire]

There's no command, but "ctrl-l" (ctrl-ell) clears the screen.

Cheers, Kevin

[Ivar Nesje]

I think the equivalent to Python's dir() command would be `names()`.

If you want to customize julia on startup, you can create a .juliarc.jl file and that file will be included at startup.

There is also the shell> mode in the REPL that allows you to type shell commands directly. To get into on the shell> mode, you can start a line with a ;

[Ivar Nesje]

The shell mode is a shortcut for Base.run(`clear`) where you just type ;clear

[Leah Hanson]

If you're looking for more exploratory-type functions/tools, I have a list of them here: http://blog.leahhanson.us/julia-helps.html

My blog post is missing the `whos` function, which is a more human-readable way to see everything a Package/Module exports:

~~~
julia> using DataFrames

julia> whos(DataFrames)
@~                            Function
AbstractDataFrame             DataType
DataFrame                     DataType
DataFrameRow                  DataType
DataFrames                    Module
EachCol                       Function
EachRow                       Function
Formula                       DataType
GroupApplied                  DataType
GroupedDataFrame              DataType
ModelFrame                    DataType

.... (lots more stuff)
~~~

-- Leah

[Nafiul Islam]

Thank you all so very much for the help. Now, I can learn more Julia without bothering everyone all the time :)