www.laffeycomputer.com/spinner.html
spinner - from Laffey Computer Imaging Price: $0 (GPL License) Current Version: 124 Date Modified: Feb. To make this effect it cycles through punctuation marks like this " - \ | / - \ | / ... By default the character is drawn in inverse video (or your terminal's equivalent). In spinner mode Spinner supports any terminal capable of handling V T100 style escape codes. In null mode there is no visible output, and Spinner will not interfere with your terminal or scrollback. If you find the little spi nner in the top left corner to be distracting use null mode. Spinner is useful for keeping telnet and ssh links from dropping due to inactivity. Many firewalls, and some ISPs drop connections when they ar e perceived as idle. By having spinner running the server is constantly sending a tiny amount of data over the link, preserving the connection . As of version 12 Spinner can also be activated with the -n switch so that, instead of displaying a spinner, it simply sends out a periodic null character to the terminal. This achieves the same anti-idle benefi t without disturbing your screen. But it lacks the coolness factor of a little spinner in the corner of the terminal... Thus (for search engines) Spinner is an anti-idle, timeout preventing, b ackground daemon process for unix variants including linux. Spinner is known to compile and work properly under NetBSD 15 and 16, Mac OS X 1 02, linux 22 and 24 Spinner also has a (mainly fun) mode I like to call "Ghost in the Machin e" mode. In this mode you can use spinner to write the spinner characte r to ANY tty, not just your own.
pid) -F Do *not* create a pid file -I Do *not* use inverse video for spinner -l <path> Set log file path (for debugging). If you run Spinner on your client the data is not sent over the wire. So you must run Spinner on the remote machine to keep the data coming to your terminal over the wire. If you do not have root access on the remote machine you can still use Spinner. Whe n you start spinner it will launch into the background as not to interfere much with your foreground jobs. " character in front so you will need to use ls -a to see it in a listing. pid Note that those are backticks (top left key below ESC, same key with ). Of course you can also just find Spinner in your process list and kill it manually that way. It will be overwritten every time you launch a copy of Spinner. So if you have multiple spinners running you will have to kill them manually. Sometimes, if you start Spinner writing to another tty when that tty is not active to begin with Spinner will not quit. As of version 12 you may opt to use the -n switch to cause spinner to send only null characters, instead of the spinning cursor. If you dr ag out a selection the highlighted text may become unhighlighted as sooner as Spinner draws to the terminal. Typically the contents of the paste buffer still remain, however. So even though you lose the highlighting you can still paste the text that you selected in the usual fashion. Again, as of version 12 you may opt to use the -n switch to cause Spinner to only send null characters to the screen (which do not show up). Note that if you use spinner on a dumb terminal, or any other terminal that does not support the escape codes you will see a lot garbage characters. If you find this check annoying, or think it should go away let me know. Note that if you use the -n switch Spinner will not check the terminal type at all, as it is not attempting to move the cursor, change inverse modes, etc. Otherwise Spinner will end up in one of screen's virtual terminals, which means that it may not be on the real terminal all the time. This could lead to an idle timeout, which is exactly what Spinner was coded to prevent. You may also be able to determine your parent tty (the original tty from which you invoked screen), and have Spinner write to that tty using the -t switch. However, if you switch to microsecond mode for the delay (-u) and use lower delays it is possible that your terminal will become somewhat garbled. You will notice that parts of the screen that shouldn't be are displayed in inverse text, or text is in the wrong place, etc. Setting a higher delay will normally make this issue non-existent. If you encounter this issue, please send me an email with your system info. Since when using the -n switch Spinner does not send printable characters you will not experience this problem at all. If you use an extremely low delay on a slow link, or use a slow-drawing terminal, be prepared for Spinner to slow your terminal down. Only one write statement and one check to be sure the tty is active per iteration. Since Spinner is meant as an anti-idle tool you will most likely keep the delay high (but less than 30 sec or so depending upon what it is that is timing out your connection to begin with). Yo u can use the -p or -P switches to modify this behavior. This will send a vt100 reset code at quit, which usually helps, but will clear your terminal screen. If you encounter this issue, please send me an email with your system info. If your terminal gets stuck in an inconsistent (read "whacked") state you can try to fix it by running Spinner with the -R switch. With this switch ALL Spinner will do is send a vt100 reset code to the tty (then quit). Using the -n switch will avoid these problem altogether by sending only null characters to the terminal. Mainly for debugging, it can, however, help you troubleshoot switch settings. Note that once Spinner has forked to the background it no longer has a controlling terminal and cannot output error messages. In or to see verbose output (or errors) after the fork you must use the -l switch and specify a filename to write to. This file will ONLY contain the output from Spinner AFTER the fork. Most likely you will never need this, but it is available if you do. Note that it t is perfectly normal to see a no such file or directory error in this log when logging out of linux. Linux cretaes and deletes files in /dev/pts/ with every change of TTY. To use this mode determine the PATH to the tty you want Spinner to write. Usually the "tty" command will display your own terminal. This should give you the basic path/filename structure (usually "/dev/ttypXX" where "XX" is a number). Then do a "who" command to see which particular tty you want to write to. This will show you a list of logged in users and their ttys. Next run spinner with the -t switch and specify the path to the desired tty. Note that you must have permission to write to the desired tty. Ttys are setup to be owned by the user logged into them, and usually setup with a group of "tty". To write to someone else's tty you either need to be root, or root needs to setup Spinner as setgid (not setuid) "tty". There are security concerns with any setuid or setgid program. Though little could go wrong, small seemingly meaningless things can lead to real big security holes. Spinner is NOT installed setgid (or setuid) by using the "make install" command.
v11 * Made Spinner pretty much Un*x/linux only, since it writes to ttys * Added a slew of command line switches and options. Beta Testers * Jonathan Dickmann * Michael Hostbaek * Patrick Norman * Evlampy Oduvanchikoff * Ed Okerson Thank You!
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