Rout

Rout v. i. - To roar; to bellow.

Overview

So what is it?

rout is a simple command-line utility that produces output. As you might guess from the name, it's written in rust.

So what is it?

rout does everything that tools like echo(1) and printf(1) provide, but rout also allows you to do interesting things such as:

• Redirect output without using the shell redirection operators (you can even output to arbitrary file descriptors or the terminal).
• Repeat ranges of commands.
• Pause for specific amounts of time.

So what is it?

It's a tool that can be used to generate a stream of bytes.

So what is it?

It's a thing that displays stuff!

Oh, well why didn't you say?!

Dialog very loosely based on and inspired by the trialogue initiated by "Cat" in the "Red Dwarf" TV series episode "Stasis Leak" (series/season 2, episode 4). If you've never seen this series, make it your life's mission to do so!

Install

$ cargo install rout

Examples

# Print "foofoofoo" to stdout, followed by "barbar" to stderr.
$ rout "foo" -r 2 -e "bar" -r 1

# Write 50 nul bytes direct to the terminal.
$ rout -t "\0" -r 49

# Write continuous stream of nul bytes direct to the terminal,
# 1 per second.
$ rout -b 1s -t '\0' -r -1

# Display a greeting slowly (as a human might type)
$ rout -b 20cs "Hello, $USER.\n"

# Display a "spinner" that loops 4 times.
$ rout -b 20cs "\r|\r/\r-\r\\\\" -r 3

# Display all digits between zero and nine with a trailing
# newline.
$ rout "\{0..9}\n"

# Display slowly the lower-case letters of the alphabet,
# backwards without a newline.
$ rout -b 1ds "\{z..a}"

# Display upper-case 'ABC' with newline.
$ rout '\u0041\u0042\u0043\n'

# Display 'foo' with newline.
$ rout '\o146\u006f\x6F\n'

# Clear the screen.
$ rout '\n' -r $LINES

# Write hello to stdout, stderr and the terminal.
$ rout 'hello' -t -r 1 -e -r 1

# Display upper-case letters of the alphabet using octal
# notation, plus a newline.
$ rout "\{\o101..\o132}"

# Display 'h.e.l.l.o.' followed by a newline.
$ rout -a . "hello" -a '' "\n"

# Display "S.O.S. Please!"
$ rout -a . "SOS" -a '' " Please\!\n"

# Display upper-case and lower-case letters of the alphabet
# including the characters in-between, with a trailing newline.
$ rout "\{A..z}\n"

# Display lower-case alphabet followed by reversed lower-case alphabet
# with the digits zero to nine, then nine to zero on the next line.
$ rout "\{a..z}\{z..a}\n\{0..9}\{9..0}\n"

# Display lower-case Greek letters of the alphabet.
$ rout "\{α..ω}"

# Display Cyrillic characters.
$ rout "\{Ѐ..ӿ}"

# Display all printable ASCII characters using hex range:
$ rout "\{x21..x7e}"

# Display all printable ASCII characters using 2-byte UTF-8 range:
$ rout "\{u0021..u007e}"

# Display the entire 2-byte range of UTF-8 characters using aliases:
$ rout "\{umin..umax}"

# Display all printable ASCII characters using 4-byte UTF-8 range:
$ rout "\{U00000021..U0000007e}"

# As above, but use more memorable aliases (and less typing ;)
$ rout "\{Umin..Umax}"

# Display all braille characters.
$ rout "\{u2800..u28FF}"

# Display 'WARNING' in white on red background.
$ rout '\e[37;41mWARNING\e[0m\n'

# Generate 10 random characters.
$ rout '\g' -r 9

History

This is a rust port of the original C implementation, utfout.

FAQ

• Can't my shell do most of this stuff?

  Yes, in some instances. However, rout generally does it more succinctly.

  You may want to ask yourself why your shell provides those extra features though (the UNIX philosophy suggests that maybe it shouldn't (think "do one job and do it well" + "creeping featurism").

Appendices

Comparison with utfout

rout is very similar to utfout, but not identical. Here are the major differences:

• rout is written in rust.

• rout uses a proper parser (using pest and pest_consume) to handle the embedded escape characters, commands and ranges that can be specified in the string arguments.

• rout has a comprehensive set of unit tests.

• Command-line handling

  Although utfout provides both short and long option names, rout only provides short option names. The reason being that rout uses a simple command-line parsing crate that I wrote as there wasn't an appropriate existing command-line parser. For further details, see this blog post.

• rout does not provide a -p flag to allow the escape character prefix to be changed.

  Although simple for utfout, this isn't available with rout because as it uses a proper parser, which needs to know the prefix character.

• utfout "" would display a null byte whereas with rout this is a NOP (no output). To display null bytes with rout, be explicit: rout "\0".

• rout simplifies utfout ranges slightly by not requiring a backslash for each value inside the range braces:

  Range	rout	utfout
  hex	"\{x21..x7e}"	"\{\x21..\x7e}"
  utf8	"\{U00000021..U0000007e}"	"\{\U00000021..\U0000007e}"