dislocate - Online in the Cloud

PROGRAM:

NAME

Dislocate - disconnect and reconnect processes

SYNOPSIS

dislocate [ program args... ]

INTRODUCTION

Dislocate allows processes to be disconnected and reconnected to the terminal. Possible
uses:

· You can disconnect a process from a terminal at work and reconnect from home,
to continue working.

· After having your line be dropped due to noise, you can get back to your
process without having to restart it from scratch.

· If you have a problem that you would like to show someone, you can set up the
scenario at your own terminal, disconnect, walk down the hall, and reconnect on
another terminal.

· If you are in the middle of a great game (or whatever) that does not allow you
to save, and someone else kicks you off the terminal, you can disconnect, and
reconnect later.

USAGE

When run with no arguments, Dislocate tells you about your disconnected processes and lets
you reconnect to one. Otherwise, Dislocate runs the named program along with any
arguments.

By default, ^] is an escape that lets you talk to Dislocate itself. At that point, you
can disconnect (by pressing ^D) or suspend Dislocate (by pressing ^Z).

Any Tcl or Expect command is also acceptable at this point. For example, to insert the
contents of a the file /etc/motd as if you had typed it, say:

send -i $out [exec cat /etc/motd]

To send the numbers 1 to 100 in response to the prompt "next #", say:

for {set i 0} {$i<100} {incr i} {
expect -i $in "next #"
send -i $out "$i\r"
}

Scripts can also be prepared and sourced in so that you don't have to type them on the
spot.

Dislocate is actually just a simple Expect script. Feel free to make it do what you want
it to do or just use Expect directly, without going through Dislocate. Dislocate
understands a few special arguments. These should appear before any program name. Each
should be separated by whitespace. If the arguments themselves takes arguments, these
should also be separated by whitespace.

The -escape flag sets the escape to whatever follows. The default escape is ^].

CAVEATS

This program was written by the author as an exercise to show that communicating with
disconnected processes is easy. There are many features that could be added, but that is
not the intent of this program.

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