NAME
vgseer - Viewglob shell overseer.
SYNOPSIS
vgseer [options]
DESCRIPTION
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.
OPTIONS
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.
FILES
~/.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.
ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES
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.
AUTHORS
Stephen Bach <sjbach@users.sourceforge.net>
SEE ALSO
viewglob(1), vgd(1), bash(1), zsh(1).
April 26, 2006