Package: wnpp Severity: wishlist Owner: Antoine Beaupre <anar...@debian.org> X-Debbugs-Cc: debian-de...@lists.debian.org
* Package name : pw Version : 2 Upstream Author : Kaz Kylheku * URL : https://www.kylheku.com/cgit/pw/ * License : BSD-2 Programming Lang: C Description : interactively filtered pipe watcher pw can monitor anything that produces textual output. tail -f /var/logfile, tcpdump, strace, ... pw does not show you everything. Of course, it reads all the data, but it does that in the background. It continuously pumps lines of input through a small FIFO buffer. This buffer is sampled, and the sample is displayed. When that sampling occurs is controlled in various interactive ways. What goes into the FIFO can be filtered and the filters can be edited interactively. With pw you can: * Interactively apply and remove filters on-the-fly, without interrupting the source. * Make recurring patterns in the stream appear to "freeze" on the screen, using triggers. * Prevent the overwhelming amount of output from a program from flooding the terminal, while consuming all of that output so that the program isn't blocked. pw can pause its display updates entirely. * Juggle multiple shell background jobs that produce output, yet execute indefinitely without blocking. When pw runs as part of a shell background job, it continues to consume input, process filters and take snapshots, without displaying anything. When put into the foreground again, display resumes. For instance the command "tcpdump -i <ethernet-device> -l | pw" turns tcpdump into an interactive network monitoring tool in which you can use the dynamic filtering in pw to select different kinds of packets, and use the trigger feature to capture certain patterns of interaction. pw is like an oscilloscope for text streams. Digital oscilloscopes sample the signal and pass it through a fifo, which is sampled to the oscilloscope screen, and can trigger the sampling on certain conditions in the signal to make waveforms appear to stand still. pw does something like that for text streams. ---- I am rather intrigued by this program. It's the sort of "swiss army knife" kind of tool that kind of makes no sense until you find a purpose for it. I've been trying to figure out where this tool fits in my toolbox and, just today, I was trying to find out what this silly Purism Librem firmware upgrade tool was doing in the background, with `ps axfu`. But I was having all this garbage out there, and it was hard to filter things out properly. I might have been able to pull something out with `watch`, but I think pw might have been better for this particular case. I'm also quite interested in using it to analyse logs or packet dumps during attacks or outages. Another similarly named package, already in Debian (and maintained by yours truly) is `pv`, the "pipe viewer". But it has a completely different function; whereas pw shows you the content of the pipe in a specific way, pv just counts lines or bytes going through it, specifically without showing you its content. There is another tool similar to "watch" that overlaps with this a little bit: https://github.com/sachaos/viddy ... it's basically the "watch" command with history. It supports searching (which pw does, and probably better) and going back in history (which pw does not). I had a hard time finding that package name again, for what that's worth... I suspect I could also forget the name `pw` quite quickly, but by packaging it, I guess I'm more confident I will forget it less. :p Probably the worst reason to package something ever, but there you go, that's how I ended up maintaining pv in the first place, so probably that means.. uh... something good something.
