retrocomputing

3972 readers

1 users here now

Discussions on vintage and retrocomputing

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Is there a precedent for a really delay-tolerant command line interface? (A bit off-topic) (lemmy.sdf.org)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

33 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I've been playing with an idea that would involve running a machine over a delay-tolerant mesh network. The thing is, each packet is precious and needs to be pretty much self contained in that situation, while modern systems assume SSH-like continuous interaction with the user.

Has anyone heard of anything pre-existing that would work here? I figured if anyone would know about situations where each character is expensive, it would be you folks.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Like MOSH? https://mosh.org/ Mosh has some predictive output and will resume sessions automatically.

Or more like tmux/screen? Has some fancy "nohup" like functions.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 month ago

Mosh plus tmux is amazing.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

That's really helpful. Thank you! MOSH might work, I'll have to play around with it.

Could you go into more detail about the tmux functions? If it's a way to write everything to files instead of a STDOUT in a predictable way, that would be great, since each packet could be a (compressed) shell script that explicitly includes which data to send back, if any.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

No, tmux does not redirect to a file. Though '>' and 'script' do.

Tmux is like 'screen' and can be wrapped with 'byobu'.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I mean, I guess you could just programmatically insert a > after every command. That's actually a pretty good idea. It's kind of obvious now that you mention it, haha!

It would be better if the tools expected to be used this way, but as a quick kludge for a project about something else it's probably sufficient.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

The first step is to make it work (at all, even badly).