3.6 Delay Lines and Halt Lines

A delay line begins with an “at” sign ‘@’, and contains a single numeric value; a number of seconds to pause before continuing on to process further lines. The reseq program will obey these instructions only if it is given the --replay option.

@ 3.0051

Delay lines are only issued by teseq when it has been given the -t option, which uses a timing file from ‘script -t’ to determine where to insert delays. Aside from that, delay lines can be useful for manual insertion into Teseq output, to introduce a delay at a particular point when using ‘reseq --replay’, which can aid in giving the user time to more easily observe terminal behavior.

If a line begins with three “at” signs together ‘@@@’, and reseq is invoked with both ‘--replay’ and ‘--halts’, then reseq will pause at this location until the user presses a key to indicate continuation. The remainder of the line will be ignored, so can be used for comments.

Such a line will never be output by teseq; it must be inserted by the user. Since reseq does not give any indication to the user that it is awaiting input (as opposed to simply waiting on a length delay line), it is highly advisable to insert this “halt” line only after a spot in the recorded terminal script that already provides such an indication.

The halt line can be useful for creating animated demonstrations of program usage, and similar sorts of presentation-oriented scripts.