Video Tutorial

🇫🇷 French documentation available here

This script allows its user to selectively run a sequence of commands in order to illustrate a process without having to type all such commands in a terminal window

Table of Contents

1. How to use this script ?
2. Why this Script ?
3. Technical Considerations
4. Contributing
5. Demo Video

How to use this script ?

As this Script allows to provide commands and descriptions to show how a given process is executed, one needs to provide commands and descriptions to the script in order to print them.

Invocation

There are two ways to run this script :

1. You can run the script running the following command :

bash <(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Charystag/video_tutorial/master/video.sh)

which will allow you to run the script with its arguments but without any installation required.

2. You can install the script in the required location by replacing the path "$HOME/.local/bin/video.sh" by the path to the file you want to install the script in. This command line will also add the target directory to the path

if [ ! -f "$HOME/.local/bin/video.sh" ]
	then curl -fsSL --connect-timeout 10 https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Charystag/video_tutorial/master/video.sh -o "$HOME/.local/bin/video.sh" \
	&& { if { echo "$PATH" | grep "$HOME/.local/bin" ; }
		then echo "PATH=\"$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH\"" >> "$HOME/.$(basename $SHELL)rc"; echo "Path : \`$HOME/.local/bin added to path'" ; . "$HOME/.$(basename $SHELL)rc" ; fi ; } \
	&& echo "Script installed at : $HOME/.local/bin/video.sh"
else
	echo "Script already installed at : $HOME/.local/bin/video.sh"
fi

A single file that stores the commands and the descriptions (recommended way)

The user can input the commands and the descriptions in a single file that will take the form of the following file :

command 1 | Description 1
command 2
command 3 | Description 3
command 4
@command 5
@command 6
command 7 | Description 7

In this example, we can observe that there are 3 ways to run a command in a sequence with this script.

1. command | Description : The command is to be specified alongside the description on the same line separated by a separator. The default separator is `|' but another separator can be specified with the option -s separator.

💡 To specify a separator that is an escape sequence (like '\t' for example)
One can use the special form $'string' (like $'\t') for example, which will ensure the translation of the escape sequence by the shell.

You can run the following command :

bash <(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Charystag/man\_reader/master/man\_reader.sh) bash QUOTING

2. command : The command will be printed and run but without any descriptive message
3. @command : The command will be run without being printed (useful for configuration/cleanup commands)

An example of the configuration with the single file for commands and descriptions is available here

💡 To test this file you can run : ./video.sh commands_file

Commands and descriptions splitted in two files

The user can input the commands and descriptions in two distincts files that will take the form of the followings :

The file :

command 1
command 2
command 3
@command 4
@command 5
command 6
@command 7

for the commands.

And the file :

description 3


description 6

for the descriptions

Here is an example of a commands file and a descriptions file one could use to run the Script with.

💡 To test these files you can run : ./video.sh commands_file descriptions_file

⚠️ The only requirement here is that the row index of the description has to match the row index of the command it describes. For example : if one was to describe only the 3rd command in a script, they would have to create a description file with all rows empty instead of the 3rd one which will contain the description of the 3rd command.

Why this Script ?

This Script came to life because I wanted to be able to execute a sequence of commands in order to demonstrate how my other scripts worked.
I couldn't bear having to manually write (with mistakes and corrections) the commands to my terminal window in order to showcase how a given script works.

Why is it useful and what problems does it solve ?

The video script solves the problem of needing to manually write the commands in order to make any demonstration/presentation.
It empowers the user to run any script (even a script that needs to read from the command line) in order to focus only on what matters, which is providing explanations about how the script works.

Technical Considerations

This script uses file descriptors 6 and 7 to read input (from either files or the command line) so it doesn't conflict with any script that reads from standard input or any file descriptor that is not 6 or 7.

Contributing

There are two ways to contribute to this project

• Send me a message on discord (for 42 students) or to the following email
• Pull requests that are currently closed but are going to be oppened soon for you to add all your amazing features to the project

Demo Video

Click on the picture to open the video on youtube