Today I was sitting in the plane from Dresden to San Francisco, and worked on my DKMS demo for the Linux Foundation summit. DKMS is a command line tool for managing device driver packages.

I wondered how to present this. The commands and features I wanted to show are quite complex, and typing all of them during the presentation is too cumbersome. Besides, I’m just a lousy typer when someone else is watching. On the other hand, pasting them into classical slides is too static; I find it much easier to understand something that reveals itself step by step.

So what I needed is to prepare the chain of commands in advance, and then send them through an interactive “step by step” interpreter. A quick apt-cache search did not reveal any readymade solution, thus I hacked together a small script “shellpresent” which does exactly that:

• a line with a command gets echoed, then it waits for a keypress, then runs the command and waits for another keypress (so that you can explain the output)
• a comment line starting with # is printed in green, and doesn’t wait for a keypress
• a blank line clears the screen
• commands are prepended by a red “$” sign to indicate a command prompt

It now does exactly what I want. Perhaps it is useful for someone else out there as well.