Google has made available to all Gmail users a Linux Shell called Google Cloud Shell for interacting with their Cloud Services. This shell is a free Debian 7 shell with a storage capacity of 5GB. It is not a VM that continues to run while you are disconnected, but rather a shell that allows you to perform tasks on a Linux box. When your session ends and you reconnect, a new machine is created for you. However, the 5GB of storage is permanent.
You can access this shell via a browser at:
https://console.cloud.google.com/home/dashboard?cloudshell=true
It is an online Linux machine you can use… also for running Delphi Linux applications. So, as an experiment, I’ve written a console app that downloads some RSS feeds data (via TIdHTTP) and dumps it in a local file. The file name is a timestamp:
SaveToFile (FormatDateTime (‘yymmdd_hhnnss’, Now) + ‘.txt’);
I’ve pushed it to a website, opened the shell, used wget (plus the URL) to download it, chmod u+x to mark it as an executable for the user, and could simply invoke it in the local folder, as in the image below:
Now the power of this shell comes from integrating with other Google Cloud services. but it is certainly nice to have a Linux shell at hand, for free, for running any application including those you build with Delphi Tokyo for Linux.
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