Sunday, October 19, 2014

Capturing the State of Mind

State of Mind
There are things out there which have state. Think of your gas tank, could be full or empty. Maybe it is an interface that is up or down, or initializing. You may need to know the state before your expect-lite script can continue.

In this blog entry I'll cover a key tip of grabbing just the state of a device by using one of the simple 7 terms from regex, the OR.

For example, perhaps you want to test an ethernet interface, but it would be really useful if the interface such as wlan0 was UP before starting your test.

$ ip link
1: lo: <LOOPBACK,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 16436 qdisc noqueue state UNKNOWN mode DEFAULT
    link/loopback 00:00:00:00:00:00 brd 00:00:00:00:00:00
3: wlan0: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST> mtu 1500 qdisc noop state DOWN mode DEFAULT qlen 1000
    link/ether 00:16:cb:b4:7c:52 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff



Or the ifconfig command, however it doesn't show the interface as DOWN.

$ /sbin/ifconfig -a

wlan0     Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:16:cb:b4:7c:52 
          BROADCAST MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 

          RX bytes:0 (0.0 B)  TX bytes:0 (0.0 B)


So using a dynamic variable we can capture the state of the interface, letting expect-lite to do all the hard work of parsing through the output. Since the 'ip' command is less typing, and newer, I"ll use it in my examples.

$interface
>ip link
<$interface
+$interface_state=state (UP|DOWN)


There are a few things occurring in this short script which are covered in older posts:
   1. $interface by assigning it to a variable, it is possible to use the power of constants to override the variable on the command line, making the script more flexible.
   2. <$interface is an expect line, which consumes the output of the 'ip link' command. Therefore making the dynamic variable capture on the next line much easier. The first state encountered in the remaining output of the 'ip link' command is the one we want.
   3. Lastly, and this is the key to this post,  (UP|DOWN) is using the regex OR '|' which means: capture either the word 'UP' or the word 'DOWN' and nothing else. The variable $interface_state is guaranteed to only be one of those states.

Now that it is easy to get the state of an interface how do we wait for the interface to change state? With a while loop, of course. Let's expand on the script we have above.

$interface
>ip link
<$interface
+$interface_state=state (UP|DOWN)
# while $interface_state is not equal to UP
[ $interface_state != UP
  !sleep 2
  >ip link
  <$interface

  +$interface_state=state (UP|DOWN)
]
; === The $interface is now $interface_state


Of course this could be improved, such as if the interface never comes 'UP', the script will spend a very long time in the while loop (eventually it will hit the infinite loop protection, and stop). Typically I add a counter variable, and check if the counter variable has exceeded a maximum number. But I'll leave that to you or another post.

When capturing states in expect-lite, it is important to put all the states in capture parens e.g. (UP|DOWN|INIT|RESET) by doing this, you are guaranteed to always capture the state.

Automating state is easy with expect-lite. State of mind... is a little harder.