dislocate(1) - man - phpman

DISLOCATE(1)                           General Commands Manual                          DISLOCATE(1)



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 sce‐
                  nario  at  your own terminal, disconnect, walk down the hall, and reconnect on an‐
                  other 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 recon‐
                  nect 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  con‐
       tents 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 sepa‐
       rated by whitespace.  If the arguments themselves takes arguments, these should also be sepa‐
       rated 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 discon‐
       nected processes is easy.  There are many features that could be added, but that is  not  the
       intent of this program.


SEE ALSO
       Tcl(3), libexpect(3)
       "Exploring  Expect:  A  Tcl-Based  Toolkit for Automating Interactive Programs" by Don Libes,
       O'Reilly and Associates, January 1995.

AUTHOR
       Don Libes, National Institute of Standards and Technology



                                           7 October 1993                               DISLOCATE(1)