This file was taken from the September 1995 edition of the Linux Gazette. --- Running splitvt Here's a great little program that I just ran across a couple days ago. I recently had to reinstall Linux (as well as DOS, OS/2 Warp, Win 3.1...) after deciding to upgrade to a 850MB second HD. I won't go into all the horrific details, but it was a bit of a mess for a few days... Anyway, during the installation, as I watched the Slackware installation dialog boxes merrily flip by... one of the utility programs caught my eye. So, I jotted down the name of the program, and after installation was done, tried running the thing... splitvt. This is a too-way-cool little program that'll let you run two shells in a split screen fashion. "So what's so cool about that..." you ask, since you've already told us that we've got 63 virtual terminals to choose from? Well, you're right, except that it lets you run two programs and watch the output from the same screen. For example, if you read the manpage for it, it gives you a suggested ~/.splitvtrc run-command file that would fire up a split screen with two login shells, and run the program top in the bottom half. That way, you'll have a dynamic display of your current CPU and memory usage while you merrily work away at some task in the top screen. If you've ever used the split screen function in the VIM editor, you'll know what I mean. I tried using it with a couple PPP login scripts I've been working on. I have one script that does auto-redial to the local university's PPP comm server (see last month's Linux Gazette for the file) and another one, which I recently wrote, that hangs around waiting for the /var/run/ppp0.PID file to appear, indicating a PPP connection had been established. Once it finds it, it automatically updates the /etc/hosts file (since the school does dynamic IP addressing), POP's my mail from the mail server and plunks it in the /var/spool/mail/root file, and then starts periodically pinging the gateway host to keep the connection up. Running it in the split screen let's me see what's going on with both progs as they run. Mucho cool. The beauty of this program is that it's really simple to use and set up. The man page is clearly written and gives an example rc file. You can also configure it to start up running two programs automatically, but specifying run -upper first_program run -lower second_program in the ~/.splitvtrc file. I'm sure that there are some fun things that can be done with this. We'll see... --- Author: John M. Fisk (fiskjm@ctrvax.vanderbilt.edu)