Remote Editing Shell

[qi3ber]

Jettero and I are working to create a remote file editing shell which would act as a sort of wrapper around our favorite editor and an FTP connection to a remote server. Part of our goal for this project is to make it so that people other than ourselves might find this shell useful, so I am posting this request for features here on PerlMonks in hopes that you can give us ideas for how you would like it it work and what features you would like it to support.

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   [ qi3ber ] I used to think that I knew it all, then I started to listen.

[jettero]

We're definitely intending to use Term::ReadLine. I'd like to see it act less like an ftp client and more like a buffer space for your favorite unix commands. We'd really like to know what others might have in mind.

Regarless of the implementation, I wanna be able to do a vi -o file1 file2 where file1 and file2 are remote files. I had it in mind to make an ftpfs module for the linux kernel ... That turn'd out to be too damn'd hard. ;)

What kinds of syntax should we use for this?

[tilly]

My question.

What about people who want to use Emacs (not me but...), or people who use methods other than ftp (rsync+ssh here!) to connect to remote files?

[Mushy]

XEmacs (and probably emacs too) has a very good module called efs available which makes remotes files available through ftp totally transparently.

[jettero]

Well, that's the thing. Our ftp-shell would let you use whatever editor you want. It would even let you cat and grep and perl -e most things. Well, if we can think of a clever enough shell interface. We would definitely buffer the files with Net::FTP... the whole point is that you wouldn't have to think about it as an ftp client. It's a file manipulation shell for remote files.

Is there even a Net::scp or anything like that? I would happilly do scp support (though our mud doesn't support that) if there were such a thing. Perhaps I should look into authoring Net::scp. I assume one of the ssh's is open source?

[ncw]

Just to save you re-inventing the wheel, but emacs has a mode to do this already - it is called ange-ftp and comes with the standard emacs distribution (try opening a file called /user@host:file and see what happens). If you want a windows editor which does this then GWD is good.

Better if you want to do this securely you can use the rcp package for emacs. You can get this package here. Though it is called rcp, the package allows many ways of editing remote files including ssh & scp.

[jettero]

That's a bit of a square wheel don'tcha think? We want to be able to do things like 'wc', 'cat', 'grep' 'diff'... 'word.exe'. I'm not sure your little emacs mode even applies.