Well, after a day or two of completely scrambling my scheduled posts — and even revisiting an application that I had already mentioned a year ago 😳 — I have some catching up to do.
Please accept this as a double post, and hopefully make up for a little lost ground. Here’s lddot and dothost, respectively, both from Jakub Wilk and both in AUR (but not in Debian).
Just because you prefer a text-based lifestyle doesn’t mean you can’t be a visual learner. dothost and lddot both cater to that, by generating neatly arranged flowcharts with the help of Graphviz and perl-graph-easy.
By themselves, the output is strictly textual, so if you can’t get access to either of those ancillary programs, you won’t get all the pretties you see above. And it should go without saying that some of the more complex arrangements are going to require extensive screen real estate. Don’t expect them to squish everything into 80×24.
I suppose you could argue that neither offers much information that isn’t available through ordinary ldd-ish or traceroute-ish tools.
And judging by their help flags, neither tool is particularly flexible or extensive, beyond generating the plain text output required by the next program in line. So if you’re looking for something with a thousand tweaks all accessible by CLI flags and XML conf files … these probably aren’t it.
But you gotta admit: They’re looking good. 😉
Inconsolation 