Keep ssh and telnet connections from dropping due to inactivity
Spinner is a small program that displays a little spinning ASCII character in the top left corner of your terminal. To make this effect it cycles through punctuation marks like this - | / - | / ... (try it to see). By default the character is drawn in inverse video (or your terminal`s equivalent). But you can turn this off with the -i switch. It supports any terminal capable of handling VT100 style escape codes. Spinner is useful for keeping telnet and ssh links from dropping due to inactivity. Many firewalls, and some ISPs drop connections when they are perceived as idle. By having spinner running the server is constantly sending a tiny amount of data over the link, preserving the connection. Thus Spinner is an anti-dle, timeout preventing, background daemon process.
Spinner is a small program that displays a little spinning ASCII character in the top left corner of your terminal. To make this effect it cycles through punctuation marks like this - | / - | / ... (try it to see). By default the character is drawn in inverse video (or your terminal`s equivalent). But you can turn this off with the -i switch. It supports any terminal capable of handling VT100 style escape codes. Spinner is useful for keeping telnet and ssh links from dropping due to inactivity. Many firewalls, and some ISPs drop connections when they are perceived as idle. By having spinner running the server is constantly sending a tiny amount of data over the link, preserving the connection. Thus Spinner is an anti-dle, timeout preventing, background daemon process.
To install spinner, run the following command in macOS terminal (Applications->Utilities->Terminal)
sudo port install spinner
To see what files were installed by spinner, run:
port contents spinner
To later upgrade spinner, run:
sudo port selfupdate && sudo port upgrade spinner
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