This was what put me up to it, yes…
… and no, I wouldn’t.
But it doesn’t make a difference what my intention was IMO, a crashed node is a crashed node. And while there are things that are obviously stupid and/or dangerous when done on a live system, that is not always the case. There are dangerous things that look innocent enough on the outside, and you only learn about it afterwards.
In production, it’s worth enabling +hmakx true with appropriate limits set (not just for the shell, but in general). In OTP 26 RC there are plenty of fixes making it a lot more powerful (like Support including off-heap binaries in max_heap_size by sverker · Pull Request #6345 · erlang/otp · GitHub)
Very cool work in progress here!
Just some thoughts here: perhaps it would be possible in some way to extend the shell with custom functionality?
I’m not sure how that would work but as an example, for edbg I create my own simple shells by making use of io:get_line/2. It works ok, but it is a bit clunky (calling erl_eval, etc) if I want to evaluate an Erlang expression. So it would be nice if I could make use of the existing shell functionality for this.
On the other hand, perhaps you should build in support for tracing/debugging straight into the shell… 
This is all very cool. I have one very specific request: I’m looking for a way to capture a transcript of the Erlang console input and output. My use case is for recording use of the remote console on a production system, but it would be useful for recording transcripts/demos of local sessions as well.
I spent a bunch of time looking in the OTP-25.x sources, and didn’t see a clean way to do it.
Thoughts?
Do you know https://asciinema.org/?
If you just want to document certain use cases,
this tool is quite nice. And the recordings are easily embeddable.
Also there’s script. I think it’s already installed in most distros. https://www.redhat.com/sysadmin/record-terminal-script-scriptreplay
having support for set erl start time is good idea for debug, as RunAsDate and faketime.
I should have clarified. It’s for compliance (who did what to production?), so it can’t be opt-in, and opting out should be at least slightly tricky.
you can have a look, for the game server, right?
I think that maybe it can be solved by docker
@rlipscombe you might consider use of restricted shell, not only for restrict some function, but also to record any of them.
Not exactly a shell directly but thought this would be of interest
Great work on this! Excited to see it all land.
I’m wondering if someone could share the new incantation for “raw mode” input handling. Previously, you’d do use tty_sl. In Elixir:
Port.open({:spawn, "tty_sl -c -e"}, [:binary, :eof])
Thanks in advance to anyone who can enlighten me.
Check out the IEx.CLI module in Elixir main branch (on my phone, so no links, sorry).
Thanks José! I’ll admit that I’ve poured over the IEx source but haven’t yet been able to create a minimal example – basically just the ability to issue get_chars and not have to wait for a newline. I’ll keep cracking at it and will post here if I figure it out.