Fake demostration software for command line

Question

I'm looking for some software that would be useful for giving demonstrations.

I regularly have to show the effects of scrips ect to classes while talking about their effects, and equaly regularly I have finger trouble and have to rewrite various commands - wasting class time and general energy.

I'd like to be able to record a sequence of commands in advance, and then play them back at the speed of my choosing.

So I might have a file that containes the commands:

echo "hello world!" 
ls ls -l  
ls -l | sort

I'd like to be able to play these commands back by typing similar ones in.

So I'd have a blinking command prompt and if I typed 'echo "hxxx' the command prompt would read

home$echo "hell

and if I typed any other letters the terminal would fill up with the remainder of the command until I press enter, when it executes the command. The point is that even if I screw up the command when typing it, the command that I'd prepared in advance would be executed.

My question is - does similar software exist for giving demonstrations? or even, is this an easy thing to script up...?

EDIT - two quick things first of all I'm on osx - but it would be nice to get a general solution for other people who arrive here from google. and second a lot of the comments/answers are concentrating on, in effect, making it fast and easy to enter long commands by means of hotkeys and the like. Actually I'd like it to at least look like I'm typing live - that's why I put in the bit about the one-to-one keymapping, but I don't think I explained that quite as well as I could have...

Answer 1

You can use Perl and the IO::Prompter module. Here's a script that should help

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use IO::Prompter<<EOF;
echo "Hello world!"
ls ls -l
ls -l | sort
EOF

use strict;
use feature 'say';
use IPC::Open2;
use Time::HiRes 'sleep';

open2('>&STDOUT',\*SHELL,'bash');

while(my $cmd=prompt '$'){
        say SHELL $cmd;
        sleep 0.05;
}

This script gives you a prompt (configurable, just edit the argument to prompt) and each keystroke inserts a character from the command block above. Backspace works too, and you can also press enter and IO::Prompter will auto-complete the line and send it to bash at a reasonable writing speed. After running the commands from the command block, the script will continue to accept any input and will send it to bash.

You should have Perl already installed. To install IO::Prompter, run cpan IO::Prompter from your favourite terminal emulator.

Answer 2

What about a macro-recorder or IronAHK?

• With IronAHK (the Linux/Mac port of AutoHotkey), you could assign keystrokes or strings to keys to make it fast and easy to enter whole chunks of data and commands. For example, you could assign the following commands as either raw strings, or as a call to system commands.

  echo "hello world!" 
  ls ls -l  
  ls -l | sort
  

  Then you can bind it to a key like A, or ⌥+1, or ⌘+Shift+F1 or whatever you like. Then you can press the hotkeys in order at runtime (this is made easier by using numeric hotkeys).

  By organizing the commands down into groups, you can get as fine-grained as you like so that you can break in at any point you think you may want or need to pause the demonstration to do something else like show files, etc.

• With a macro-program, you can record your keystrokes, then play them back, usually with the ability to adjust the speed-control.

Answer 3

I wrote shellscript-runner.zsh to do what you want. Download it, run zsh, then while in zsh, source the file. Now shellscript-runner is armed and ready for you to run the built-in demo. Read your way through the demo text at the end of the file, and try it out. I hope you'll find it every powerful and easy to use.

Your desire to be able to control when each character appears is not currently implemented but could be added.

Zsh (in case you've never tried it) has many features not present in bash. Zsh's powerful line-editing features, made shellscript-runner possible. It would be impossible to implement in bash.