Vii 4.2

Vii (pronounced “seven”) is a simple program which accepts input from the standard input and displays pages of the input on the terminal. These pages are delimited by form-feeds (or EOF). The display can be scrolled if the output is wider or longer than the screen.

Vii can also repeatedly execute a command (at a configurable interval) and the most recent output is displayed. This is useful for status monitoring where the command itself does not have a repeatable or curses interface.

I've been carting this program around since about 1990, because it is generally useful for monitoring things. I've made a project for it on SourceForge because it makes it nice and easy to gab vii when working on other folks' systems. The overly grand version number was caused by an accident with a contraceptive and a time machine.

This page is hosted by SourceForge: see also the Project and Statistics pages.
For example, monitoring a printer queue can be accomplished by a command such as
while : ; do clear; lpq | tail -23; sleep 60; done

which has the disadvantage of flickering annoyingly, plus it can't scroll and long lines make it too long for the display. Monitoring a printer queue can also be accomplished using the vii command:
vii -e "lpq" -i 60

which has the advantage of being able to scroll up and down for lists longer than the screen, and also left-right for wide texts.

You could support this project with a donation.

Files for Download

There are several ways to obtain the software, either as source code or pre-compile binaries.

The Master Sources
The following files are availoable for download from this web site.

File Name Description

vii-4.2.README The README file from the tar distribution.

change_log.txt The release notes, detailing what has happened in this release.

vii-4.2.lsm Brief description in LSM format.

vii-4.2.tar.gz The complete source.

vii-4.2.ae The complete source, in aedist format.

debian/ Pre-built debian packages for Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic x86_64

SourceForge
The best possible download speed for the source tarball will be from the SourceForge download pages, and here is the most recent tarball from there.

Ubuntu Packages
If you use Ubuntu Linux, there are pre-built packages available for installation using the normal sudo apt-get install method, from this package archive (PPA).
Instructions are available there for how to manually add the PPA to your /etc/apt/sources.list file, but the following commands are sufficient on recent versions of Ubuntu:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:pmiller-opensource/ppa sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install vii

The Bleeding Edge
Vii is developed and maintained using Aegis, a transaction based software configuration management system.
Vii developers may access the latest development changes through the Aegis web interface.

Vii is written and owned by Peter Miller <pmiller@opensource.org.au> and is freely distributable under the terms and conditions of the GNU GPL.

There is more Software by Peter Miller at his home page.

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times since 28-Nov-2011.