PLAYBACK(1)

📦
version 4.4ga6 · 2 versions
, in centos-stream 10, fedora 43, fedora 44

💖 PLAYBACK(1) — the manual page, but make it cute 💖

General Commands Manual ✨ bestie edition ✨

🌸 NAME 🌸

playback — the IBM x3270 trace file playback tool 🎀 (yes, that's literally the whole name, no notes)

🦋 SYNOPSIS 🦋

playback [ -b ] [ -w ] [ -p port ] trace_file

✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

okay so here's the vibe: playback opens a trace file (presumably one that was made by the x3270 Trace Data Stream facility 💫) and plays back all the host data inside it, sending it over a socket to whatever processes connect to it. And it also shows you the data that the process sends back in response. two-way gossip, basically. 💅

It runs in one of two modes — bidirectional and interactive.

In bidirectional mode, which you get with the -b option, playback verifies that the emulator connected to it is sending the correct stream of bytes back in response to the host stream. ngl that's genuinely so useful for automated testing. 👑

Otherwise, playback is used interactively. The -w command-line option stops it from processing interactive commands until a process connects; if you don't use -w, commands get processed immediately. Keyboard commands control the flow of data from the file to the socket. Those commands are:

  • s — send one line of data.
  • r — send one record of data (so, send data until the TELNET EOR sequence is reached).
  • m — send data until a mark (a line beginning with $) is encountered in the file.
  • e — send the rest of the data in the file.
  • t — send a TELNET DO TIMING MARK sequence.
  • c — echo the command to stdout as a comment.
  • d — disconnect the current socket and wait for another connection.
  • q — exit playback.

💀 EXIT STATUS 💀

  • 0 — success. slay. ✨
  • 1 — set-up failure. 😭
  • 2 — run-time failure, like mismatched data. 💀

🌈 EXAMPLES 🌈

Say you wanted to interactively play back a trace file called /tmp/x3trc.12345. In one window, run:

playback /tmp/x3trc.12345

In another window, start x3270 with the command:

x3270 localhost:4001

playback will announce the connection. 🫶

After that, the s and r commands will send data from the file to x3270.

Now, to automate a unit test to verify that x3270 produces a known data stream, run:

playback -b /tmp/x3trc.12345

In another window, start x3270 as above. playback will exit with status 0 if the byte stream matches, and status 2 if it does not. no in-between, it's giving decisive. 💅

👑 SEE ALSO 👑

x3270(1)

mwah 💜 that's the whole page — this version of the PLAYBACK(1) manual page is dated 30 December 2021, so if you're reading it way later, hey, still iconic. bye bestie!! 🎀✨🦋

📦 where this page comes from