Description

pxexec is a tool to execute commands over the X11 protocol, inspired by xexec. I use pxexec to securely call local commands from a remote machine over X11 forwarding.

Installation

pxexec is easiest to install with cpanminus:

cpanm --no-lwp --no-wget https://github.com/downloads/xabbu42/pxexec/App-pxexec-0.2.tar.gz

If you want to install pxexec manually you can use the following commands:

wget --no-check-certificate https://github.com/downloads/xabbu42/pxexec/App-pxexec-0.2.tar.gz
tar -xzf App-pxexec-0.2.tar.gz
cd App-pxexec-0.2
perl Makefile.PL
make
sudo make install

Usage

localhost:~ $ echo foobar > gna
localhost:~ $ pxlisten &
localhost:~ $ ssh -X otherhost
otherhost:~ $ pxexec cat gna
foobar
otherhost:~

To start pxlisten automatically when starting your X session, add pxlisten & to your ~/.xinitrc, or use pxlisten -v 2> pxlisten.log & to get a log file with the executed commands.

Example Script for Emacs

#!/usr/bin/env perl
use strict;
use warnings;

use File::Spec::Functions qw/rel2abs/;

if ($ENV{'SSH_CLIENT'}) {
	my $host = `uname -n`;
	chomp $host;
	system 'pxexec', 'emacsclient', '-c', map {
		$_ = "/" . $host . ":" . rel2abs($_) unless $_ =~ /^-/;
		$_;
	} @ARGV;
} else {
	system 'emacsclient', '-c', @ARGV;
}

Todos and Ideas

This is not a roadmap.

• Implement configurable restrictions to what commands can be executed.
• Consider supporting to stream output using Coro. Currently all output is read in pxlisten and send to pxexec as one block. So you only see any output from pxexec after the command finished.