[asterisk-users] Improving CLI Help - was [Re: 1.6.2 No "soft hangup"?]

[Steve Johnson]

On Tue, Apr 20, 2010 at 10:49 AM, Steve Edwards
<asterisk.org at sedwards.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 20 Apr 2010, Tilghman Lesher wrote:
>
>> On Tuesday 20 April 2010 11:05:07 Steve Johnson wrote:
>>> I wanted to force a hangup of a SIP to SIP call from the Asterisk CLI>
>>> prompt, and found references on using the command "soft hangup
>>> <SIP/channel>", but as you can see below, the "soft hangup" command
>>> does not seem to exist, and there is no mention about it in the
>>> UPGRADE*.txt documents.
>>>
>>> Can anyone shed light on what would replace "soft hangup" in 1.6.2.x ??
>>> (This asterisk server is strictly SIP/IAX2, no DAHDI hardware)
>>
>> "channel request hangup <name>"
>
> How obvious.
>
> Kind of makes me wish I still used 1.2 -- oh wait, I do.
>
> Seriously though, IMNSHO, with every release the CLI gets more obtuse.
>
> I'd like to see a more natural and intuitive interface following a "verb
> noun" model like Oracle, MySQL, or even GDB.
>
>       hangup [sip|iax|dahdi] channel <channel-name>
>
> seems so "obvious."
>
> --
> Thanks in advance,
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Steve Edwards       sedwards at sedwards.com      Voice: +1-760-468-3867 PST
> Newline                                              Fax: +1-760-731-3000
>
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Further to Steve Edward's comment, I think things would be more
obvious if the help system was improved slightly, for instance:

If you were trying to figure out the commands dealing with peers, you
would be able to type:
*CLI> help peer
No "peer" command found.  Possible alternatives:
                iax2 show peer Show details on specific IAX peer
               iax2 show peers List defined IAX peers
                sip show peers List defined SIP peers
                 sip show peer Show details on specific SIP peer
          (and so on, maybe using the "[More]" option to help it be readable)

In this case, if I could use the "help" system to search on all
occurrences of the word "hangup" in the available commands, I would
probably have found it myself instead of bothering the list.