Getting output from terminal commands for visualization

I’m a “Juce Weenie”. I love it.

I’ve been incredibly blown away by JUCE’s capabilities when it comes to visualizing data using the many draw/graphics functions. I’ve built various envelope types, waveform visualizers, etc all which are grabbing values from midi values off a synth with atom’s ctrlr project and would like to dig further down this rabbit hole to see what other useful tools I can build with the JUCE libraries.

For a completely non-music related project, I’m interested in the possibility of getting the output of various terminal commands to visualize data… similar to geektool. I’d like to be able to get the output of several terminal commands: du, system_profiler, etc. I’m a tech ops manager at a silicon valley video production facility and would like to use this tool to display system info on our lookout plasma display to visualize things such as what volumes are connected to what workstations, how much space is on said volume, network speed, system idle, etc…

Would it be possible (if it’s possible) to point me in the right direction to get from here to there using your tools? In addition to simply getting the output I’m also curious if it’s possible to schedule the sending of these (du, system_profiler) commands with Lua… I’d assume I’d use a timer for that but I’m not sure if you can actually schedule a timer to repeat after X hours/mins/seconds.

The ChildProcess class probably does most of what you want. On Mac, be sure to get the latest tip, there used to be a bug with fetching output.

Glad you like it!

I guess the class you’d want would to look at would be ChildProcess, and then just have a thread that uses it to run your processes and parse their output?