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 for 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 CONTROLS

cleo always 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           skips the current command
q           quit playback

When things go wrong during the presentation, you can tell cleo to pause and open a subshell so that you can fix the problem. The subshell will have the same environment as the playback. When you exit the subshell (usually by typing exit) you will be returned to the playback.

Key         Action
------------------------------------------------------------------
?           open subshell, then resume at current command
!           open subshell, then resume at previous command

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 theselves 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 echoed to the screen and executed immediately. This is useful for running setup commands at the beginning of your demonstration.

• Within a command, %%% (three percent signs) will cause cleo 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 here (the live demonstration starts around 10:47):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-JkFXm8Xgk

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

TODO

Jump to arbitrary command number

Support backspacing in recorded command

Support mult-line recorded commands

Write unit tests

AUTHOR

Jeffrey Ryan Thalhammer <thaljef@cpan.org>

COPYRIGHT

Copyright (c) 2014, Imaginative Software Systems