Pound-Shell 0.8.6 Alpha

Pound-Shell 0.8.6 Alpha is yet another extremely useful utility designed to act as an automated lab-book for people that conduct experiments in their standard shell environments. The high-level goal of Pound-Shell is to allow users to log data processing experiments (with little/no manual effort or interference) in such a way that they can later go back and recall (or rediscover) and reproduce their steps.

Basically, it's designed to help us determine data's provenance. Further, Pound-Shell allows users to almost automatically re-run old experiments with new data. This type of work includes processing files with R, using gnuplot, interactive perl/python, standard data processing with shell commands (awk, sort, join, etc.), etc. Pound-Shell does not attempt to trace commands if it detects that a program has "captured the screen". Examples include Vim, emacs, etc. In such cases, Pound-Shell waits for the sub-process to end and then resumes recording.

With Pound-Shell, you can send a colleague your data-set(s) and your lbsh lab-book, and they can understand/reproduce/verify your results with Pound-Shell's automated tools. In essence, you simply run "lbsh" and it automatically creates a new shell (the same type [bash | tcsh | etc.] that you already use) in a child process. Figure 1 shows how your session goes through Pound-Shell to the real shell underneath.

When you decide you want to start logging commands for an experiment, you tell Pound-Shell to start logging. Then Pound-Shell simply records your commands (and also traces into the above mentioned tools). It does not record passwords, or anything else that is not output the screen. You can use tab-completes, issue commands that span multiple lines, use shell history, etc. When you are done, you tell Pound-Shell to stop logging. Then you may do whatever and Pound-Shell will quietly wait. You may repeat as needed without having to restart Pound-Shell each time.