Chapter 6.  Scripting

Table of Contents

Introduction
Linux Script Basics
Host Independence
Checking Device Connection
Random Device Identity
Actual Device Identity
Editing a PIB
Initialize a Device
Update a Device
Generating Powerline Traffic
Reading PHY Rates
User Interaction

Introduction

The Open Powerline Toolkit comes with a variety of example scripts in the scripts folder. They have proven useful to Atheros engineers but may not satisfy your specific needs. This chapter explains how some of these scripts work so that you can modify them to do what you need to do. Most scripts covered in this chapter are intended for a Powerline Workstation.

Atheros provides GNU bash scripts as examples and does not guarantee that they are suitable in any or all situations. Furthermore, Atheros may not always update them to reflect changes to toolkit programs. Toolkit command line syntax may change from one release to the next and so Atheros cannot guarantee that older scripts will work with newer programs. The scrips are small, simple and well organized. Do not run them until you have read them and understand what they do and how they work.

Sample scripts are available in the scripts folder. Some extremely useful ones are flash.sh, upgrade.sh and traffic.sh. They all reference files hardware.sh and firmware.sh.

Although Toolkit programs run under Windows their power is realized through scripts. Scripting requires environmental support for sophisticated symbol substitution and expansion. Most Linux shells are suitable but Microsoft DOS is not. On Windows, consider using installing Cygwin and using their bash shell. Scripting languages Tcl and Python are suitable alternatives. Another alternative is to write small Windows programs that format and execute the DOS shell commands you want.