One use of this which came to mind is tailing log files or watching the ongoing output of a process.

Are there any limits on how big a pad can get? Are there issues with scrolling when the content gets to the bottom? I haven't run EtherPad in a while, so don't remember.

There's a project called Log.io (http://logio.org:8998/) which does streaming and scrolling for events which ends up feeling a bit similar. Not sure if you can pipe stdout to it though.

Very interesting!

Strictly speaking, this redirects its stdin to EtherPad.

If you pipe something into it, the first command's stdout will become this script's stdin.

Can i use screen command with EtherPad too ?

Would be nice sharing a terminal session on the web with others.

You could at least hack something like that up. From within screen, yu should be able to type C-a H to begin logging to the `screenlog.0` file.

From another terminal, you can then do something like tail -f screenlog.0 | etherpad mypad

Also, look into the ttyrec and script commands

The limitations: The screen method won't follow you across screens and it won't interpret ansi escape codes

Great idea and it is HN-worthy. Thanks for sharing.

I thought I'd browse the source code and find a cool tool that does this using basic unix commands and syscalls. But then:

    #!/usr/bin/env node

facepalm. And since the code uses an etherpad dependency, it is completely trivial. How is this HN-worthy?

How is this comment HN worthy? It brings no valuable knowledge to the discussion, and discourages the sharing of novel ideas. The code may be trivial, but the idea certainly is not.

How is this trivial? It's unique, I have never seen anything like it.

Also, why would he make it harder for himself than necessary? I'd like to see your shell/C++/asm implementation

Because it's an interesting idea. It doesn't have to have a hardcore implementation to be HN-worthy.

Honestly, I wasn't too worried about making something complex - I wanted to write something quickly that would work reliably.

Yes, it's trivial to write. But it fulfilled a need that we had, and getting something useful released rather than building something needlessly complex is, from what I understand, everything that HN is about.

Would not using node single-handedly make this HN-worthy? What if it were say, python?