vgseer - Viewglob shell overseer.

vgseer [options]

vgseer creates a Viewglob-supervised interactive shell and opens up a socket connection to a listening vgd(1) process. It maintains a snapshot of the relevant parts of its local filesystem and tracks the user's command line and other information, which is communicated to vgd.

In basic usage, you can run vgseer with no arguments and it will connect to a local vgd on a Unix-domain socket. If that's all you want to do, though, you may as well just use the viewglob(1) wrapper script.

If you've connected to a remote machine with telnet or ssh and would like Viewglob tracking for that shell+terminal, you can do so by calling vgseer and passing it the host and port of your local vgd. Obviously this requires vgseer to be installed on the remote machine. NB: the communication with vgd is done over a separate socket. If you want this information encrypted, you'll need to setup additional ssh tunneling for it.

vgseer is compatible with any recent version of bash(1) or zsh(1) and doesn't assume any particular shell configuration.

This program follows the usual GNU command line syntax, with long options starting with two dashes. A summary is included below.

-h, --host=<name>

Connect to a vgd process on the given host. If specified, an Internet-domain socket will be used (rather than Unix-domain), even if <name> is an alias for localhost.

-p, --port=<number>

Connect to a vgd process listening on the given port. The default is 16108 (1-GLOB). If connecting locally, a Unix-domain socket is used unless explicitly disabled.

-c, --shell-mode=<name>

Shell to be used. name can be “bash” or “zsh” (default is bash).

-t, --shell-star=<on/off>

Show or hide the asterisk character which is usually at the beginning of a vgseer shell prompt.

-e, --executable=<path>

Use the given executable as the shell instead of its first reference in the path. Note that if this isn't a version of the shell chosen with --shell-mode, you won't get very far.

-u, --unix-socket=<on/off>

Try to use a Unix-domain socket (default for local connections). If this option is turned on, the host is assumed to be localhost. If a different host is specified later, this option is automatically turned off.

-H, --help

Show summary of options.

-V, --version

Show the version of the program.

~/.viewglob/vgseer.conf

If present, this file specifies a default configuration for vgseer. The file syntax is:

<long_option_name> [ <whitespace> <value> ]

The '#' character can be used for comments.

So, to always use zsh, disable the asterisk at the prompt, and always connect to a vgd on a host named juniper, the file should contain:

shell-mode

zsh

shell-star

off

host

juniper

Configuration file options can be overridden on the command line.

LANG

LC_ALL If either of these values include a variation of "UTF-8", vgseer will accommodate you. This is important, as otherwise Viewglob will have trouble keeping track of the cursor position.

Stephen Bach <sjbach@users.sourceforge.net>

viewglob(1), vgd(1), bash(1), zsh(1).