DISLOCATE(1)

✨ DISLOCATE ✨

okay bestie, welcome to dislocate 💅 a whole General Commands Manual moment, and honestly? it's giving underrated icon. let's get into it.

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🌸 NAME 🌸

Dislocate — disconnect and reconnect processes 🦋

like, you just... walk away from a process and come back to it later? yes. that's the whole vibe.

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🎀 SYNOPSIS 🎀

dislocate [ program args...  ]

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💖 INTRODUCTION 💖

so Dislocate lets processes be disconnected and reconnected to the terminal ✨ literally the main character of not-losing-your-work. possible uses, no cap:

• you can disconnect a process from a terminal at work and reconnect from home, to continue working 🏠
• after having your line be dropped due to noise, you can get back to your process without having to restart it from scratch 😭 (the relief. the relief.)
• if you have a problem that you would like to show someone, you can set up the scenario at your own terminal, disconnect, walk down the hall, and reconnect on another terminal 🚶‍♀️
• if you are in the middle of a great game (or whatever) that does not allow you to save, and someone else kicks you off the terminal, you can disconnect, and reconnect later 🎮

periodt. that's the pitch.

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🫶 USAGE 🫶

when you run it with no arguments, Dislocate tells you about your disconnected processes and lets you reconnect to one 👑

otherwise, Dislocate runs the named program along with any arguments.

by default, ^] is an escape that lets you talk to Dislocate itself 💬 at that point, you can disconnect (by pressing ^D) or suspend Dislocate (by pressing ^Z).

any Tcl or Expect command is also acceptable at this point 👀 for example, to insert the contents of the file /etc/motd as if you had typed it, say:

send -i $out [exec cat /etc/motd]

to send the numbers 1 to 100 in response to the prompt "next #", say:

for {set i 0} {$i<100} {incr i} {
    expect -i $in "next #"
    send -i $out "$i\r"
}

scripts can also be prepared and sourced in so that you don't have to type them on the spot 📝 iconic behaviour honestly.

Dislocate is actually just a simple Expect script 🧚 feel free to make it do what you want it to do, or just use Expect directly, without going through Dislocate. Dislocate understands a few special arguments 👑 these should appear before any program name. each should be separated by whitespace. if the arguments themselves take arguments, these should also be separated by whitespace.

the -escape flag sets the escape to whatever follows 🌈 the default escape is ^].

ok so pro tip from me to you: that -escape thing goes before the program name, got it? slay.

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💀 CAVEATS 💀

this program was written by the author as an exercise to show that communicating with disconnected processes is easy ✨ there are many features that could be added, but that is not the intent of this program. so like, don't come for it for being minimal — it's minimal on purpose, bestie 🙈

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🌈 SEE ALSO 🌈

• Tcl(3), libexpect(3)
• "Exploring Expect: A Tcl-Based Toolkit for Automating Interactive Programs" by Don Libes, O'Reilly and Associates, January 1995. 📚

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👑 AUTHOR 👑

Don Libes, National Institute of Standards and Technology 🫶

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and that's the whole page, fr fr 💜 this was the General Commands Manual, dated 7 October 1993, and it's lowkey a legend. go disconnect something and reconnect to it later like the icon you are. bye bestie! 🎀✨