Command Dispatching

In a few network projects, we're asked to write an interactive shell, to receive command from user input. Here is the general pattern I used. The example I used here is from the P2P network project, and you can find my earlier post about use select to monitor user input and socket at the same time.

Command Handing Functions

Since each command may have various number of arguments or options, it's straightforward to use the standard argc and argv interface. So for each command, we define there handling functions as follows.

int cmd_help(int argc, char* argv[]);
int cmd_myip(int argc, char* argv[]);
int cmd_myport(int argc, char* argv[]);
int cmd_register(int argc, char* argv[]);
int cmd_connect(int argc, char* argv[]);
int cmd_list(int argc, char* argv[]);
int cmd_terminate(int argc, char* argv[]);
int cmd_exit(int argc, char* argv[]);
int cmd_download(int argc, char* argv[]);
int cmd_creator(int argc, char* argv[]);
int cmd_packet(int argc, char* argv[]);

Command Table

It'll be tedious to manually decide which handling function to call. Instead, we'll use an data structure called Command Table to gracefully handle the cases for all commands.

struct {
    char* name;
    int (*handler)(int argc, char* argv[]);
    char* help_msg;
} cmd_table[] = {
    {"HELP", cmd_help, ": Show available user interface options."},
    {"MYIP", cmd_myip, ": Show IP address of this process."},
    {"MYPORT", cmd_myport, ": Show port on which this process is listening."},
    {"REGISTER", cmd_register, " <server_IP> <port_no>: Client register to server."},
    {"CONNECT", cmd_connect, " <destination> <port_no>: Connect to a peer client."},
    {"LIST", cmd_list, ": Show list of connected hosts."},
    {"TERMINATE", cmd_terminate, " <connection_id>: Terminate a certain connection"},
    {"EXIT", cmd_exit, ": Close all connections and terminate this process." },
    {"DOWNLOAD", cmd_download, " <file_name> <file_chunk_size_in_bytes>: Download a file in parallel."},
    {"CREATOR", cmd_creator, ": Show author's info."},
    {"PACKET", cmd_packet, " <packet_size_in_bytes>: Set packet size."},
    {NULL, NULL, NULL},
};

Here we define, for each command, which handler to use and also the help message. More specifically, our cmd_help and be written as simple as follows.

int
cmd_help(int argc, char* argv[]) {
    printf("Available commands are:\n");
    for (int i = 0; cmd_table[i].name != NULL; i++) {
        printf("%s%s\n", cmd_table[i].name, cmd_table[i].help_msg);
    }
    return 0;
}

Command Dispatching

Now suppose you already found STDIN_FILENO is available to read using select, which means user has entered some input and hit the {% key Enter %} key. Then we need to read the input and dispatch the command.

int
handle_command(void) {
    char* command = NULL;
    size_t len;
    /* let getline allocate memory for us */
    if (getline(&command, &len, stdin) < 0) {
        perror("getline");
        return -1;
    }
    if (cmd_dispatch(command) < 0) {
        return -1;
    }
    free(command);

    return 0;
}

Here we use the getline function to read the input from stdin. getline will allocate the buffer for us, so we need not worry about the input size. But we do need to free the buffer afterwards.

int
cmd_dispatch(char* cmd) {
    char *argv[512];
    int argc=0;

    for (char* word = strtok(cmd, " \t\n");
            word != NULL;
            word = strtok(NULL, " \t\n")) {

        if (argc >= 512) {
            printf("[ERROR]: too many arguments\n");
            return -1;
        }

        argv[argc++] = word;
    }

    if (argc == 0) {
        return 0;
    }

    for (int i = 0; cmd_table[i].name != NULL; i++) {
        if (!strcmp(argv[0], cmd_table[i].name)) {
            return cmd_table[i].handler(argc, argv);
        }
    }

    printf("[ERROR]: command not found.\n");
    return -1;
}

In cmd_dispatch, we first split the inputs into an array of strings, then we traverse the command table to find a match.