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NAME

cleo - Play back shell commands for live demonstrations

SYNOPSIS

cleo COMMAND_FILE

DESCRIPTION

cleo is a utility for playing back pre-recorded shell commands in a live demonstration. cleo displays the commands as if you had actually typed them and then executes them interactively.

There is probably an easy way to do this with expect or a similar tool. But I couldn't figure it out, so I built this. Your mileage may vary.

PLAYBACK

cleo pauses and waits for a keypress before displaying a command and before executing it. Pressing any key besides those listed below will advance the playback:

Key                       Action
------------------------------------------------------------------
s                         skip the current command
r                         redo the current command
p                         redo the previous command
c                         run all remaining commands
q                         quit playback

COMMANDS

cleo reads commands from a file. Each line is treated as one command. Blank lines and those starting with # will be ignored. The commands themselves can be anything that you would type into an interactive shell. You can also add a few special tokens that cleo recognizes:

  • !!!

    Commands starting with !!! (three exclamation points) are not displayed and will be executed immediately. This is useful for running setup commands at the beginning of your demonstration.

  • ...

    Commands starting with ... (three periods) will be executed without waiting for a keypress. This is useful if you want to show a series of commands but don't need to stop and explain each one as you go.

  • %%%

    Within a command, %%% (three percent signs) will cause playback to pause and wait for a keypress before displaying the rest of the command. This is useful if you want to stop in the middle of a command to give some explanation.

Otherwise, cleo displays and executes the commands verbatim. Note that some interactive commands like vim are picky about STDOUT and STDIN. To make them work properly with cleo, you may need to force them to attach to the terminal like this:

(exec < /dev/tty vim)

EXAMPLE

I use this for giving demonstrations of pinto, such as the one seen at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-JkFXm8Xgk (the live demonstration part starts around 10:47).

The command file that I use for that presentation is included inside this distribution at examples/pinto.demo. This file is for illustration only, so don't expect it to actually work for you.

LIMITATIONS

cleo only works on Unix-like platforms. It may work on Windows if you use Cygwin. Personally, I have only used cleo on Mac OS X.

TODO

  • Jump to arbitrary command number
  • Support backspacing in recorded command
  • Write unit tests

AUTHOR

Jeffrey Ryan Thalhammer [email protected]

COPYRIGHT

Copyright (c) 2014, Imaginative Software Systems