cleo - Play back shell commands for live demonstrations
cleo COMMAND_FILE
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.
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
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)
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.
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.
- Jump to arbitrary command number
- Support backspacing in recorded command
- Write unit tests
Jeffrey Ryan Thalhammer thaljef@cpan.org
Copyright (c) 2014, Imaginative Software Systems