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

[sean darcy]

Jose P. Espinal wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Maybe you could do something in shellscript too:
> 
> e.g.
> asterisk -rx "help" | grep -ia "something"
> 
> That would behave just as describe in the suggestion (but it's easier to 
> do :P)
> 
> You could place that in a  tiny shellscript, that takes the 'something' 
> as an argument:
> 
> #!/bin/bash
> token=$1
> asterisk -rx "help" | grep -ia "${token}"
> 
> Save that with the name of your preference (somewhere inside your $PATH, 
> would be nice), and just execute it like a normal command:
> 
> [name_you_gave_it] sip
> [name_you_gave_it] peer
> [name_you_gave_it] whatever
> 
> 
> Note:
> You then could make a lot of fancy customizations to parameters of your 
> script, etc., and even use other tools for if needed (e.g. gawk, sed, etc.)
> 
> 
> 
> sean darcy wrote:
>> Olle E. Johansson wrote:
>>   
>>>> 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.
>>>>       
>>> THat's a very good idea. Thank you! 
>>>
>>> Now we need someone that codes it :-)
>>>
>>> /O
>>>     
>> Well I'm certainly not the one who could code it, but is there any way 
>> to simply "grep" all the help. So, for instance, if you did "help 
>> hangup" you got:
>>
>> hangup request <no description available>
>>
>> which you now get,
>>
>> followed by all the commands that have "hangup" in them, including their 
>> descriptions. For instance:
>>
>> But see:
>> channel request hangup <channel>
>>          Request that a channel be hung up. The hangup takes effect
>>          the next time the driver reads or writes from the channel
>> etc
>> etc
>>
>> sean
>>
>>
>>   
> 
Very slick. Using your script as "asterisk-help":

asterisk-help hangup
         channel request hangup Request a hangup on a given channel
                 console hangup Hangup a call on the console
                 hangup request <no description available>

sean