Description

Start a program in a pseudo terminal and:

• redirect its input from stdin, and output to stdout
• log everything in a log file named ptylog by default
• inject keystrokes and other events according to directives given in a file

The PTY part of this programm is originally by Rachid Koucha enhanced by Lars Brinhoff and Pierre Gentile for use in this program.

http://rkoucha.fr/tech_corner/pty_pdip.html

https://github.com/larsbrinkhoff/pty-stdio

If you want to see another demonstration, just look at the screencast in the README of my smenu utility here: https://github.com/p-gen/smenu

IMPORTANT - PLEASE READ

The keystrokes injection mechanism only works if the binary is running with root privilege.

The two main ways to achieve this are:

• by setting the setuid bit in the executable's permissions (ex: chmod 4755).
• by running the programme with sudo or an equivalent program.

make install will produce an executable with the setuid bit set. If that's not what you want, please unset this bit (ex: chmod 755) and use sudo.

Note that if you do this and use sudo, then the program started by ptylie will work as root and not with the user's account.

Building

As git does not store the timestamps of the files it handles, I encourage you to use the provided build.sh script to build this program.

Use it as you would with configure.

Synopsis

ptylie [-V] [-l log_file] [-w terminal_width] [-h terminal_height]

[-i command_file] [-s srt_file] [-d subtitle_duration]

program_to_launch program_arguments

command_file

Each character present in this file will be injected into the keyboard buffer of program_to_launch. Legal C special characters like \t and \b are understood.

Some extra special sequences are also understood:

\s[n]:	sets an interval of n ms between each of the next characters to inject. When not set or set to a value less than 1/20s, the interval is 1/20s.
\S[n]:	sleeps once for n ms.
\u[hh...]:	injects a sequence of up to 4 hexadecimal numbers (UTF-8).
\x[hh...]:	injects a sequence of up to 256 characters (each coded on 2 hexadecimal positions).
\W[XxY]:	resizes the slave's terminal to X columns and Y lines.
\c[color sequence]:	injects color codes, the trailing m is automatically added. (Ex: 33;1 injects the sequence \e[33;1m which means yellow). Use man console_codes for details.
\R[file]:	inserts the directives found in the file file from now. At end of file, switch back to the previous included file or the default command file.
\Cc:	injects the character CTRL-c where c is any character. The result is the same whether the character is lowercase or uppercase.
\Mc:	injects the character c preceded by an escape (0x1b). This sequence is generated when the ALT key is used.
\m[file]:	sets another map file to be used by the subtitles generation, see below.
\k:	activates/deactivates the subtitle generation. If this command is used a .srt file is generated (named ptylog.srt by default, see the -s option).
\T:	injects the terminfo bytes sequence given as arguments (ex: home).

Map files

These files are ASCII files used by the subtitles generation mechanism and contain lines formed by two or more fields.

The first field must contain an byte sequences and the next fields form the text that will be associated with this sequence.

This text will be output as a subtitle each time the byte sequence is seen.

Map file example:

---8<---

h \ue28690

k \ue28691

l \ue28692

j \ue28693

J \ue2879f

K \ue2879e

\u0b Ctrl Home (Ctrl \ue28696)

\u0a Ctrl End

---8<---