My situation is the following: I've got a lot of small gizmos ( pretty close to routers, not exactly but anyway that's irrelevant) ; they are running a bare-bones MIPS-based Linux distro.
To control them, one can telnet there ( thru serial port ) and issue commands to an interactive bash-like shell which then writes back some output. The shell's input and output are both attached to /dev/ttyAS0.
Now, I'd like to automate all of this, i.e. write a program that will run inside the gizmo, be a small server listening on some port, and which would pass on any command to the said shell, capture shell's output and relay it back to whoever contacted to server.
I:
1) can install (small, <500KB) programs inside the gizmo
2) can't modify the OS, startup scripts, the shell, anything
3) have root access
4) know how to write a SOAP server
5) know how to get a SOAP message, translate it to a command and inject it into /dev/ttyAS0
6) DONT KNOW how to capture the shell's reply
7) know how to, having shell's reply, translate it back to a SOAP message and reply to the original inquirer.
So basically, the problem is 6) : how to, having injected a string to /dev/ttyAS0 and thus having made the shell execute it, capture the shell's output ?
I am aware of
http://etbe.coker.com.au/2008/02/27/redirecting-output-from-a-running-process/
i.e. I know that I could change the shell's stdout if I had GDB ( or strace ) running inside the box, but I can't install it there - it's too big and anyway this approach seems too much like a hack.
So, summarizing:
How root can capture stdout of an already running process, IN PURE C, without gdb or strace, with no access to the way the process is started?
Or - almost equivalently - how to capture what's being written to a terminal, IN PURE C ?
You might want to take a look at reptyr. It will probably need some adaptation to work for your system though
Have you tried driving the serial port with a kermit script? I would probably forgo trying to insert a more clever proxy on the device and just try and drive the existing interface.
If you really want to get it on the device, you may be able to look at the source to something like screen or kermit to get a sense of how they interact with ttys.
Related
I know how to get the stdout into a file using dup/dup2 system calls, but how do I get the entire output that would be normally shown on my terminal(including the prompt that says my username along with the $ symbol and the current working directory) to a file?
Yes you can, but this may be difficult in many details (depending on your expert level). For the shell to behave normally (I would mean exactly as in a terminal), then it needs to interact with a terminal (special system object). So you need to create a program that behave like a terminal, this what pseudo-terminals devices (/dev) are intended for. Read documentation about this to implement it but roughly, your application should behave like the user so should be connected to the slave side of the pseudo-terminal, and the shell to the master side of the pseudo-terminal. Then you can easily log real inputs made by the user and catch outputs made by the shell.
Can't comment cause of low reputation.
I would say there is no way to do that inside a code in C. Instead, you could use bash for example to redirect everything to a file, and leave the code in C as it is.
In this way you have all the info you want to save: prompt, current directory, call to the program (including flags), and of course the output of the program.
Well, you can do:
-For bash prompt PS1: Echo expanded PS1 (in case you want it expanded, if not there is a simple way to do it just echong PS1)
- For executed command: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/169259/how-to-capture-command-line-input-into-logfile-and-execute-it-at-the-same-time
- Standard output and error output: Redirect stderr and stdout in a Bash script
And that's all you want to capture, I think.
Look up the script command in Unix systems. If you want to capture all keyboard and std in/out for a command, use the script executable. If you want to see how it's done, look up the source.
This is a very beginner-level question in C.
Don't know where to start looking/searching.
So, if I have a program continuously running in C, what is the best way to accept input through the command line into the program?
EX, mysql is already running, but you can process a command call
mysql SELECT * FROM *
Do I need a different program to write to file/stdin?enter code here
Clarification:
So, mysql seems to be able to take in commands while it is already running... is that possible in C?
Goal:
I have some hooks into open gl es, and I want to run a continuous draw loop in the background, while having the ability to call commands such as
glhookprogram make "object1" model "triangle" program "default"
glhookprogram attr "object1" position "1.0, 1.0, 0.0" scale "2.0" rotation "45, 0, 0"
this way, I can have a node server run hw-accelerated animations in javascript on the rpi.
Looks like this is what you need (and I'm sorry - I won't be going into too much details as there are plenty of sources on the Web about that):
A "server" - that would be your background process that stays running in memory and can accept and process commands (requests)
A "client" - a (short-running?) process that can accept commands from user (GUI, command-line. Network? Other process?) and send requests to your "server"
This is not a trivial task for a beginner. I would suggest googling for "server-client" and for "inter-process communications" first and go from there.
The range of options to "accept input" into your server includes (but is not limited to) the following:
(Windows) messages
Shared memory and a command queue (producer-consumer)
Shared file (just listing it here for completeness, I'd advise against this particular one for your case)
Named pipes
Sockets (thanks for reminding me of those in the comments, can't believe I missed that!)
Basically I want to do a program almost like a keylogger. The thing is that I as network admin sometimes I don't remember what I did to a machine on certain case, or same times I make howto's and tutorials for linux. I want to record what have i done.
So basically the idea of this program is:
you type the name of the program, (I call it rat for the moment)
$ rat
Welcome everything from now on will be recorded
recording $ ls
file1 file2 file3
recording $ quit
Bye bye
Everything you do will go out to an xml file. Something like this
<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8' ?>
<rat>
<command>
<input>ls</input>
<output>file1 file2 file3</output>
<err><err>
</command>
</rat>
i am doing some tests with fp_in = popen( input, "w");
and system, but first with popen i cant change directories and with "system i cant properly manage the input and output.
I was also checking if there is something I can do to bash like a plugin but haven't find any information.
At some points if feels like it I should create another shell (which is way beyond my current abilities) or fork bash sh. But it should been that complicated right.
I am open to suggestion where to start.
I am rusty with C, so I am reading again a lot of basic stuff.
With the xml file, later i was thinking on making a program to store this data and/or editing this data so i can create tutials and howto.
I can think of many ways of expanding this up to using printscreen so all the stored images go to a file you can upload to a server (for the moment i am glad to store the data). It could be a usefull tool.
ps. I do know this can be use for evil things too.
There already exists the script command, which will record all input and output into the terminal, writing it into a transcript. I would recommend just using that, unless you have particular needs that it doesn't meet. Actually, the nicest version of script that I've seen has been the NetBSD version, so you may want to look into that if the Linux version doesn't meet your needs.
If you would like to write it yourself, instead of using system, I would recommend that you use fork/exec to create a single shell process, which you copy all input and output into. To get an idea of how this works, I'd recommend looking at the source code for an existing version of script.
Most shells have a script built-in which will simply record the text in- and out- from the command line. Not quite what you're looking for... To my surprise script is not a built in, which means it is a model for building what you want.
The script command does almost what you want: it simply records the text in- and out- from the command line.
If you make your prompt distinctive (so that you can reliably tell the difference between shell commands and everything else) you can post-process the output of script to achieve your goals. Alternately you can hack script to get it to emit the XML you're looking for.
You can also try approaching this from a different angle. Instead of using a regular shell, connect to the machine using ssh or telnet and run your commands that way. Many ssh/telnet clients (PuTTY, for instance) have an option to log all console input and output during the session. You should be able to post-process this log to generate whatever type of logfile that you need.
Depending on your setup, you might not even have to use a second machine (you should be able to ssh into yourself).
I am trying to control ftp client from C program (OS X). I did fork and execve - process is started ok. The problem is with pipes - I can send command to ftp client process and get feedback from it just fine (If i send "help\n" i get back help output) but what I never get in pipe is "ftp> " prompt. Any ideas?
Ivan
Your ftp client is probably behaving differently if stdin/stdout is a terminal or something else (lots of program do, for a start the C library does buffering in a different way...) If you want to control that, search information about pseudo-terminals, that's a little too technical to be explained here. (And looks first at programs like expect, it's possible you won't have to write yours).
A program can examine stdin to find out whether it's a terminal or a pipe. In your case, the FTP program probably does that (for example to know whether it can use escape sequences to render progress bars or offer command line editing).
If you really need the prompt, you have to look into PTYs (pseudo terminals) which emulate a console.
wild guess: isn't the "ftp>" prompt written to STDERR ?
I have the following simulation in C for cars in a traffic circle
alt text http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/175564/cars.png
For example,
7 <space> <enter>
gives more cars to the simulation, while
s1 <enter>
puts a top sign to the incoming road #1.
I want to put the simulation to an internet page such that users can try it.
However, I do not know where I should start.
I know Joomla and little about Django. Perhaps, they can be useful.
How can you put a C program to a Webpage such that users can use it?
CGI is what you want; it will let you embed any program you want into a website, it was made for that purpose. Then perhaps embedding a few more options with PHP and HTML will let the user acutally input data into the program via the web. It should not be too hard.
Take a look here for more info: http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/perl/cgi.html
I think that is a good pointer in the right direction. I hope that helps.
You could run the C code in a flash app using alchemy:
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/alchemy/
Here's a good intro to writing CGIs in C: http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/forms/cgic.html
However, since you're a beginner, I'd recommend porting your program to PHP. It's a very easy language to pick up, and it's a much easier route than writing a CGI in C.
I assume the C program needs input while it's running and not via command-line arguments? If I'm wrong, you can just use PHP and shell_exec() to run the program. The function returns anything printed to stdout.
Such a page might look like:
$sim = shell_exec("/path/to/binary -a 5 -b 6");
echo $sim;
Where the string passed to shell_exec is exactly what you'd type on the command line.
If you want a dynamic simulation, where the cars moves while you watch , you'll need an applet or flash.
A cgi program renders the page on each http GET/POST (on reload, submit etc)
and that is probably not what you want.
I would start with a flash or java applet wrapper. You can communicate with your application over a tcp connection and display the results in the flash or applet.
I would recommend going with sockets. If your C program could set up and listen on a local or internet socket, you could use the socket facilities in any language to send it arguments and get output.
If that's going to be too much of a pain, have php exec the program while directing the output to some file. Then, have php read that file.
Looking at the output of your program, I think trying to print the results of shell_exec() will result in clobbered output.
So, you could shell_exec("/bin/program -arguments > /tmp/prog-tmp.txt") , then read prog-tmp.txt.