Thursday, November 18, 2004

Neat feature in Konsole

I just discovered the feature "Send input to all sessions" in Konsole, the KDE terminal app. Konsole is a tabbed terminal app -- a replacement for xterm -- that's part of KDE. It allows you to open more than one terminal session in the same window, much like Firefox allows you to open multiple tabs in your browser.

Well, if you open more than one terminal session withing Konsole and then go to View > Send Input to All Sessions, you can type a command in one terminal and have it entered in all the terminals you have open within that Konsole window.

A scenario where this could be useful is if you are using Konsole to ssh into multiple servers to check out log files. E.g., supposed you're maintaining three different mail servers. You could ssh into each one of them, each in it's own tab, activate the Send Input to All Sessions feature, then in one tab enter the command "tail -f /var/log/mail". This would allow you to easily switch back and forth between tabs and see what's going on. Likewise, if you needed to apply a patch to multiple boxes, you could login to them and issue a command to fetch the patch from a repository and install it.

Neat stuff!

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