Meow documentation

invocation

Meow has very simple command line syntax. To start Meow, simply issue the following command:

java -jar meow.jar sound_map [skips]

Or, if you have included meow.jar in your CLASSPATH, you can run Meow by directly invoking its main class.

java sharky.app.meow.Main sound_map [skips]

You must have Java 1.2 (JRE or JDK) installed to run this program. (See the download page for more information.)

configuration

Regardless of how you launch Meow, it requires only a single argument to get started: the name of the sound map file. A second, optional argument can follow to indicate the number of initial lines in the stream you want meow to ignore.

The sound map file is a simple text file that defines the patterns and their corresponding sound files. Each line defines one map entry and contains two fields. Both fields are encoded as C strings, enclosed by quotes and containing optional C-like escape sequences.

The first field defines a pattern and the second field indicates the sound file to be played when the pattern is seen.

In the pattern string, the Bash-like wildcard characters '*' and '?' are interpretted in their traditional fashion. Namely, '*' matches any number of characters while '?' matches any single character.

In most cases, the URL string following the pattern string will indicate a file on the local drive. For example, to point to the sound file "alert.wav" in the current directory, the URL would be "file:alert.wav".

A sample map is shown below:

# Sample sound map used with an Apache log file

# Play "alert.wav" whenever access from 192.168.1.2 is logged:
"*192.168.1.2*" "file:alert.wav"

# Sound like a cat whenever the Meow distribution is downloaded.
"*meow.jar.zip*" "file:meow.wav"

usage ideas

Meow can be connected directly to a new process' output or it can be used to "tap into" an already existing text stream. Here are some examples:

Run a process and "play" its stdout:

process process_arguments | java -jar meow.jar map_file

Tap into a log file that is growing from an already runny web server:

tail -f apache_log_file | java -jar meow.jar map_file 10

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