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

submitted 6 months ago by CanadaPlus to c/retrocomputing

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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.

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[-] CanadaPlus 2 points 6 months ago

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.

[-] MNByChoice@midwest.social 2 points 6 months ago

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

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

[-] CanadaPlus 2 points 6 months ago

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.

[-] MNByChoice@midwest.social 2 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

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

this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2024

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