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    (reposting HN comment)

    I wrote something like this a few years ago, except you could write shell scripts to transform the output to HTML. For example, if you have a CSV file, you could write a plugin to turn it into an HTML table.

    http://www.oilshell.org/webpipe/doc/webpipe.html

    (If you click through the image there is a screencast)

    https://github.com/andychu/webpipe

    This was mildly successful, although I didn’t feel the UI was that great. It can be a little awkward to have the GUI in a separate window than the CLI.

    Really I wanted some kind of tiling window manager, but I tried a few and they were surprisingly uncomfortable for a heavy CLI user like myself.

    I still think there is some way to unify the CLI and GUI that hasn’t been invented.

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      I, too, have a similar solution, though it’s not a service, to this which I intended to use to make a real-time display of a garbage collection algorithm for a presentation. I never did the visualization piece, though.

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      What I like to do, is piping the program into mail. While this does not provide me any updates during the run, it’s like an alert that triggers when the job is done.

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        Very nice! FWIW, put a quick walkthrough together, in case anyone wants to check it out …

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          Interesting idea. Curious that this only resulted in 4 lines of output even when I let it run for a while though:

          while true; do date +'%s'; sleep 1; done | nc seashells.io 1337
          
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            Please tell me there is some kind of transport encryption involved here

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                I can’t get behind shipping logfiles in plaintext over the wire. There can be sensitive information in there.

                At least on the consumption side you provide TLS and a random url.

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                  The idea was for Seashells in its current form to be used for non-sensitive information (and the random URL added a small amount of security).

                  So there’s no encryption in v0.1 (well, there’s HTTPS when viewing…).

                  I’m implementing encryption in v0.2. The current plan is TLS + password-based client-side encryption (encrypted by the open-source seashells tool and decrypted in Javascript in the viewer’s browser)