Re: catching things written to terminals

[Bart Kuik <kuik alwaysaccess nl>]

On Sun, 2003-09-21 at 19:13, Peter Oliver wrote:
> Traditionally, Unix users and the system itself have been able to
> communicate by writing messages directly to a terminal.  Syslog, wall (and
> hence shutdown), write, and talk all do this.  Unfortunately, this is a
> bit iffy under X11 because you may well not have any terminals open, or
> you may have a lot of other things going on and not notice the message
> until it is too late.
> 
> Perhaps some part of Gnome (the panel, maybe?) should quietly open a tty
> to listen for such messages, which could then be passed to the user
> somehow.  If a dialogue box seems too obtrusive, perhaps an sound could play
> and an icon could appear in the notification area.

Most messages from X apps are outputted to the terminal X was started
from. So a 'startx >.Xlog 2>&1' (when starting X from textmode) should
put all the stuff to .Xlog. You can open a terminal with 'tail -f .Xlog'
then to show the output in that terminal. In that way it should be
possible to output all messages of a terminal to a file, and 'tail -f'
it in an xterm.

There is a tool called root-tail, that does a 'tail -f' to the
root(lower) window of your X screen. Unfortunately, Nautilus draws its
desktop on top of this root-screen, leaving the output of root-tail
between the background and the desktop.

I don't know anything about the technical possibilities, but it should
be nice to have a 'root-tail' that works on top of Nautilus, but that
doesn't behave like a 'real' window (grabbing mouseclicks and kb-focus
and stuff). Maybe a transparent gnome-terminal without borders or
menubars that passes every mouseclick to the desktop should be possible
(?). I'm no Gnome/GTK programmer (but I have read some gtk-tutorials for
C and Perl), so I don't know...

Bart