The on command lets you set up actions which will occur when certains events happen. For example, you can create "personalized" away messages for different individuals, periodic actions that occur at specific times, just to name a few.
Note that using ON JOIN and ON LEAVE to automatically greet people entering or leaving your channel is extremely poor etiquette. See /HELP ETIQUETTE.
ON [mode]<event> [-|^] [action]
ON [mode]#<event> [-|^] [action]
There are seven modes for each event. I've shown the # mode as a separate line because it requires a serial number. Different modes are specified by preceeding the event with one of the following characters:
+ Make event very noisy. It will display
everything it does.
- Make event quiet. It will not display any of
its actions.
^ Make event silent. Just like - above except it
inhibits the normal event display as well. The
only command that will cause output in this mode
is the ECHO command. This can be used to redefine
how event messages look.
& Make the /ON local to only your own server. e.g.
/on -&msg * echo One of mine
Will echo "One of mine" ONLY when someone from my own
current server sends me a message. If nothing matches
in this list, then it will resort to the default ONs.
Of if there was an /ON ^msg * echo :$0: $1- then it
it will use that for anyone not on your server.
@ This is like & except that it is exclusive to your
server. It will NOT look at the default ONs if
there is no match for your own server.
# Allows you to assign a serial number to the specific
<event> such that you can have multiple ON's trigger
of one <event>. Further discussion of this below.
Note this is a pound sign NOT a number. The serial
number comes right after the <event>.
If no character is specified, you will be warned upon activation
of an event (this is somewhere between the + and - modes).
The <match> parameter may be a single word, or a list of words surrounded by double quotes ("). The <match> determines specifically which events of the given <event> will cause the action to take place. The <match> may contain wildcards, and the specifics of the <match> parameter are dependant on the <event> type. If the <match> is preceeded by a -, that entry will be removed from the action list. For example:
ON PUBLIC -BigCheese
ON INVITE -"* +Har"
The first will remove "BigCheese" from the PUBLIC list, the second will
remove -"* +Har" from the INVITE list.
You can remove all entries from a given event list by doing
the following:
ON <event> -
For example:
ON MSG -
removes all entries in the ON MSG list.
If the <match> is preceeded by a ^, then no action will be taken for a match for that event (this is used when you wish to exclude a nickname or list of nicknames from a larger wildcard match, see HELP ON FLOOD for an example).
Added two new wildcards to the pattern matching system. '%' matches any sequence of characters except a space. '?' matches any single character. e.g. ON ^msg "bob % % blue" whatever would match a message from bob with two words and then the word 'blue'. The [action] parameter is that action that will occur when the specified event occurs which matches the given <match>. The action parameter is parsed by the command parse in exactly the same way as an IRCII alias is parsed, using the same inline variable expansions (See ALIAS). Also, depending on the event that is activated, there will be certain values passed as arguments to the action, just as if they were arguments to an alias. You may use the $0, $1, $2... etc variables to expand out these arguments. The arguments passed for each event are described in the individual help files for each event.
Here are some examples:
ON -MSG *cheese* /NOTICE $0 No Cheese Messages Please!
Whenver a MSG is received from anyone with a nickname with
cheese in it, a NOTICE will be sent out to that user. This
action will generate no noticeable effect to you (it is marked
as "quiet").
ON MSG ^BigCheese
If used with the first example above, this will prevent the
action from being taken when a message is sent from BigCheese.
Here is an example of how to redefine the way a message looks:
ON ^MSG * /ECHO :$0: $1-
All MSGs received from now on will look:
:BigCheese: Hello! The same can be done with the other event types.
IMPORTANT IMPORTANT: A full discussion of serial numbers is given in on/serial_numbers as there is too much to place directly in this help file. Please read this one as it will help prevent collisions between different scripts.
More examples are given for the individual event types.
See Also: on/serial_numbers ircii/programming alias expressions (Special Cases is of particular relevance)