i still want to check my Bootloader + Linux Startupcode for an embedded device. Therefore i want to catch the time for every command printed to the serial port.
I know there are programs like putty (which i can dearly recommend), getty, cutecom, picocom, screen etc. But none of these add timestamps to the incomming messages on the host screen (I'm not really talking about the date, more like how many ms have gone since the first output). It actually sounds not like a big deal.
I found out there is one script doing what i wanted to have, called grabserial but it's not working properly, since it's to slow to process the whole output. I discussed this problem in a different forum (if you want to know: grabserial problem but it's not part of the topic). So i can't use that script.
Now again: can you tell me a terminal for Linux which adds timestamps to every line, which was received from a Serial Port?
Thank you
[Edit:] I've found a pretty rough workaround with cereal, which wants to have some settings, since it locks the port everytime you use it. In the end, it adds the actual date and time, not the startup time and difftime between each step, so as you can see I'm still looking for an adequate solution.
This might come 3 years too late, but minicom (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minicom) supports timestamps for every line printed on the terminal. In Ubuntu it's directly available in the default repos.
You might want to look in to using strace to monitor the serial port. See How can I monitor data on a serial port in Linux?
If you are willing to build the binary by yourself, you can try a branched picocom (https://github.com/codepox/picocom). This is based on picocom 1.7 which is a little old.
I have forked and enhanced this picocom and made it be able to show either delta-time or wall-clock timestamp. You can find it here (https://github.com/tdwong/picocom-with-timestamp). You still have to build the binary by yourself.
Here is how I use it. Note, N is the command to enable/toggle timestamp.
$ picocom -b 115200 /dev/ttyUSB0
...
<ctrl-a> N # enable delta-time timestamp
<ctrl-a> N # toggle wall-clock timestamp
<ctrl-a> N # disable timestamp
tio found at https://tio.github.io provides various timestamp options:
-t, --timestamp
Enable line timestamp.
--timestamp-format <format>
Set timestamp format to any of the following timestamp formats:
24hour 24-hour format ("hh:mm:ss.sss")
24hour-start 24-hour format relative to start time
24hour-delta 24-hour format relative to previous timestamp
iso8601 ISO8601 format ("YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss.sss")
Default format is 24hour
In your case, showing how much time has passed since start, that would be something like this:
tio -t --timestamp-format 24hour-start /dev/ttyUSB0
Settings can also be enabled in tio configuration file ~/.tioconfig
I believe that ExtraPuTTY is the solution you are looking for.
However, I wasn't clear if you wanted something to run ON Linux or just to be able to monitor it (SSH to Linux). If you didn't want a Windows solution, then I apologize.
Related
I need to build a small size tcpdump for the embedded project that I am working on. Since the memory size of my embedded device is limited, I need to strip all the unwanted functionality in the TCPDUMP while building it. My target is make the tcpdump executable size less that 300KB. After using "strip tcpdump option" and disabling package options in the configure, I have reached 750KB. To achieve this, I want to remove all the protocol decoding capability of tcpdump. I want the tcpdump to have no more that hex dump capability. I have a below initial list of unwanted protocols that has to be removed.
print-802_11.c
print-802_15_4.c
print-ah.c
print-ahcp.c
print-aodv.c
print-aoe.c
print-ap1394.c
print-atalk.c
print-atm.c
print-babel.c
print-bootp.C
print-bt.c
print-calm-fast.c
print-carp.c
print-cdp.c
print-cfm.c
print-chdlc.c
print-cip.c
print-cnfp.c
print-dccp.c
print-decnet.c
print-dtp.c
print-dvmrp.c
print-eap.c
print-egp.c
print-eigrp.c
print-enc.c
print-esp.c
print-fddi.c
print-forces.c
print-ipx.c
print-isakmp.c
print-isoclns.c
print-juniper.c
print-krb.c
print-lane.c
print-m3ua.c
print-sip.c
print-sl.c
print-sll.c
print-sunatm.c
print-zephyr.c
print-usb.c
print-vjc.c
print-vqp.c
print-timed.c
print-tipc.c
print-token.c
I started to remove these from Makefile.in and removing the function calls manually in the source code. But then I realized this approach is not scalable.
Is there a better way to do this ? Someway by using configure options?
I am new to this. So please explain.
Is there a better way to do this ? Someway by using configure options?
No, there are no such configure options. You'll have to do it the non-scalable way.
"I want to remove all the protocol decoding capability of tcpdump. I
want the tcpdump to have no more that hex dump capability. [...] Is
there a better way to do this ?"
I think there is, but with a very different approach.
If all you want from tcpdump is:
the capability of specifying an interface,
put this interface on promiscuous mode or not, or monitor mode if it's a Wi-Fi interface,
apply a capture filter,
and then spit the output in a file or as hex to stdout,
...you'd be better write your own from scratch, using libpcap (which is what tcpdump uses BTW).
This should be no more than 100-400 lines of C code depending on the options you want to have, you'll have a very, very small executable, and no more dependencies than tcpdump which require libpcap anyway. All the complexity is in the dissection, once you remove all that, what you have is basically... a pcap loop.
It's not that hard, and looks to me as far less work than your approach - and also more interesting work.
There's a tutorial to start with (30-60 minutes read):
http://www.tcpdump.org/pcap.html
...at the end of this tutorial, you'll already have the core of your program.
And you can find loads of info (and ask questions) in the related SO tags:
https://stackoverflow.com/tags/libpcap/info
https://stackoverflow.com/tags/pcap/info
...and have about 70 well-written man pages documenting the full pcap API (you'll end up using maybe 10-20 of these).
Linux's kernel-level console/non-X terminal emulator contains a very cool feature (if compiled in): each /dev/ttyN device corresponds with /dev/vcsaN and /dev/vcsN devices which represent the in-memory (displayed) state of that tty, with and without attributes (color, flashing, etc) respectively. This allows you to very easily cat /dev/vcs7 and see a dump of /dev/tty7 wherever cat was launched. I used this incredibly practical capability the other day to login to a system via SSH and remotely watch a dd process I'd forgotten to put inside a screen (or similar) session - it was running off a text console, so I took a few moments to finetune the character ranges that I wanted to grab, and presently I was watching dd's transfer status over SSH (once every second, incidentally).
To reiterate and clarify, /dev/vcs{,a}* are character devices that retrieve the current in-memory representation the kernel console VT100 emulator, represented as a single "line" of text (there are no "newlines" at the end of each "line" of the screen). Just to remove confusion, I want to note that I can't tail -f this device: it's not a character stream like the TTY itself is. (But I've never needed this kind of behavior, for what it's worth.)
I've kept my ears perked for many years for a method to dump the character-cell memory state of X terminal emulators - or indeed any arbitrary process that needs to work with ttys, in some similar manner as I can with the Linux console. And... I am rather surprised that there is no practical solution to this problem - since it has, arguably, existed for approximately 30 years - X was introduced in 1984 - or, to be pedantic, at least 19 years - /dev/vcs{,a}* was introduced in kernel 1.1.94; the newest file in that release is dated 22 Feb 1995. (The oldest is from 1st Dec 1993 :P)
I would like to say that I do understand and realize that the tty itself is not a "screen buffer" as such but a character stream, and that the nonstandard feature I essentially exploited above is a quirky capability specific to the Linux VT102 emulator. However, this feature is cool enough (why else would it be in the mainline tree? :D) that, in my opinion, there should be a counterpart to it for things that work with /dev/pts*.
This afternoon, I needed to screen-scrape the output of an interactive ncurses application so I could extract metadata from the information it presented in my terminal. (There was no other practical way to achieve the goal I was aiming for.) Linux' kernel VT100 driver would permit such a task to be completed very easily, and I made the mistake of thinking that it, in light of this, it couldn't truly be that hard to do the same under X11.
By 9AM, I'd decided that the easiest way to experimentally request a dump of a remote screen would be to run it in dtach (think "screen -x" without any other options) and hack the dtach code to request a screen update and quit.
Around 11AM-12PM, I was requesting screen updates and dumping them to stdout.
Around 3:30PM, I accepted that using dtach would be impossible:
First of all, it relies on the application itself to send the screen redraws on request, by design, to keep the code simple. This is great, but, as luck would have it, the application I was using didn't support whole-screen repaints - it would only redraw on screen-size change (and only if the screen size was truly different!).
Running the program inside a screen session (because screen is a true terminal emulator and has an internal 2D character-cell buffer), then running screen -x inside dtach, also mysteriously failed to produce character cell updates.
I have previously examined screen and found the code sufficiently insane enough to remove any inclinations I might otherwise have to hack on it; all I can say is that said insanity may be one of the reasons screen does not already have the capabilities I have presented here (which would arguably be very easy to implement).
Other questions similar to this one frequently get answers to use typescript, or script; I just want to clarify that script saves the stream of the tty itself to a file, which I would need to push through a VT100 emulator to obtain a screen image of the current state of the tty in question. In other words, script would be a very insane solution to my problem.
I'm not marking this as accepted since it doesn't solve the actual core issue (which is many years old), but I was able to achieve the specific goal I set out to do.
My specific requirements were that I wanted to screen-scrape the output of the ncdu interactive disk usage browser, so I could simply press Enter in another terminal (or perform some similar, easy sequence) to add the directory currently highlighted/selected in ncdu to a file-list of files I wanted to work with.My goal was not to have to distract myself with endless copy+paste and/or retyping of directory names (probably with not a few inaccuracies to boot), so I could focus on the directories I wanted to select.
screen has a refresh feature, accessed by pressing (by default) CTRL+A, CTRL+L. I extended my copy of dtach to be capable of sending keystrokes in addition to dumping remote screens to stdout, and wrapped dtach in a script that transmitted the refresh sequence (\001\014) to screen -x running inside dtach. This worked perfectly, retrieving complete screen updates without any flicker.
I will warn anyone interested in trying this technique, however, that you will need to perfect the art of dodging VT100 escape sequences. I used regular expressions for this so I wasn't writing thousands of lines of code; here's the specific part of the script that extracted out the two pieces of information I needed:
sh -c "(sleep 0.1; dtach -k qq $'\001\014') &"; path="$(dtach -d qq -t 130000 | sed -n $'/^\033\[7m.*\/\.\./q;/---.*$/{s/.*--- //;s/ -\+.*//;h};/^\033\[7m/{s/.\033.*//g;s/\r.*//g;s/ *$//g;s/^\033\[7m *[^ ]\+ \[[# ]*\] *\(\/*\)\(.*\)$/\/\\2\\1/;p;g;p;q}' | sed 'N;s/\(.*\)\n\(.*\)/\2\1/')"
Since screenshots are cool and help people visualize things, here's a look at how it works when it's running:
The file shown inverted at the bottom of the ncdu-scrape window is being screen-scraped from the ncdu window itself; the four files in the list are there because I selected them using the arrow keys in ncdu, moved my mouse over to the ncdu-scrape window (I use focus-follows-mouse), and pressed Enter. That added the file to the list (a simple text file itself).
Having said this, I would like to clarify that the regular expression above is not a code sample to run with; it is, rather, a warning: for anything beyond incredibly trivial (!!) content extractions such as the one presented here, you're basically getting into the same territory as large corporations/interests who want to convert from VT100-based systems to something more modern, who have to spend tends of thousands commissioning large translation frameworks that perform the kind of conversion outlined above on an especially large scale.
Saner solutions appreciated.
So the syslog log is made up of a header (timestamp + hostname) and a message (tag + content). Is any of this customizable? I mean how can i decide the format of timestamp or whether I want hostname to be logged.
Is there someway to do this from the syslog system call or syslog.conf file?
UPDATE:
I'm using syslogd and FREEBSD8
It's pretty much hardcoded for security reasons (you don't want faked messages which look like they came from host X at time T but came from x at t).
If you want to mess with it, you'd have to hack usr.sbin/syslogd/syslogd.c, functions printline() and logmsg().
Syslog's date format, limited as it is, is defined in RFC 5424, which FreeBSD's built-in Syslog follows accurately.
If you want more flexibility or detail, you'll either need to post-process your logs, or switch to a different syslog daemon. Note that by doing so, you may make it impossible for standard log analysis tools to interpret your logs.
One favourite alternative is syslog-ng, which is available in the ports tree.
cd /usr/ports/sysutils/syslog-ng && make install clean
I've to merge two (or more) audio files (like a guitar and a drum track) into a single file.
I'm running over linux CentOS and I'd need a command line tool to do so, because I've got to run this as part of a background process, triggered via crontab of a custom bash script.
I also need to be able to change the pan, volume, trim and start time (i.e I want the guitar track to start after 1.25ms after the drum track so that they can be both in sync with each other).
My first choice would be ffmpeg, but I was wondering if there could be something more specific, reliable and less fuzzy than ffmpeg.
thx a ton!
-k-
Sox is the best way to do this. Your command would be the following:
sox -M guitar.wav drum.wav final.wav
I don't know for sure if sox can do all that (esp start time), but I think so: http://sox.sourceforge.net/
Certainly it would be my "goto" tool for that, short of writing my own.
Let's say I have 10 programs (in terminals) working in tandem: {p1,p2,p3,...,p10}.
It's hard to keep track of all STDOUT debug statements in their respective terminal. I plan to create a GUI to keep track of each STDOUT such that, if I do:
-- Click on p1 would "tail" program 1's output.
-- Click on p3 would "tail" program 4's output.
It's a decent approach but there may be better ideas out there? It's just overwhelming to have 10 terminals; I'd rather have 1 super terminal that keeps track of this.
And unfortunately, linux "screen" is not an option. RESTRICTIONS: I only have the ability to either: redirect STDOUT to a file. (or read directly from STDOUT).
If you are looking for a creative alternative, I would suggest that you look at sockets.
If each program writes to the socket (rather than STDOUT), then your master terminal can act as a server and organize the output.
Now from what you described, it seems as though you are relatively constrained to STDOUT, however it could be possible to do something like this:
# (use netcat (or nc on some systems) to write to a socket on the provided port)
./prog1 | netcat localhost 12312
I'm not sure if this fits in the requirements of what you are doing (and it might be more effort than it is worth!), but it could provide a very stable solution.
EDIT: As was pointed out in the comments, netcat does exactly what you would need to make this work.