Google has made available to all its Gmail users a Linux Shell to interact with their Cloud Services, called Google Cloud Shell. This shell is a free Debian 7 shell with 5Gb of storage. It is not a VM that keeps running while you are disconnected, but it is a shell allowing you to perform task on a Linux box. Every time the session expires and you reconnect, a new machine is created for you. The 5GB of storage is persistent, though.

You access to this shell via 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 web site, 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 certainly nice to have a Linux shell at hand, for free, for running any application including those you build with Delphi Tokyo for Linux.