```

rtshell =======

Introduction

rtshell provides commands used to manage individual RT components and managers, as well as complete RT Systems. It can be used with the OpenRTM-aist middleware or middlewares that use a compatible CORBA-based introspection system.

Many of the commands allow components and managers running on nameservers to be treated like a file system. Directories can be entered, components can be cat’d and activated/deactivated/reset, connections made and removed, and so on.

Other commands are used in conjunction with RtsProfile XML/YAML files to manage complete RT Systems. These are rtresurrect, rtteardown, rtcryo, rtstart and rtstop.

The commands are aimed at users of OpenRTM-aist who wish to manage components on low-resource systems, systems where a GUI is not available (particularly where no network connection is available to manage components from another computer), as well as those who face other difficulties using RTSystemEditor. Being familiar with using a command-line is a benefit when using these commands of rtshell.

This software is developed at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology. Approval number H23PRO-1214. The development was financially supported by the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organisation Project for Strategic Development of Advanced Robotics Elemental Technologies. This software is licensed under the Eclipse Public License -v 1.0 (EPL). See LICENSE.txt.

Requirements

rtshell requires rtctree 3.0. It must be installed for the commands to function.

The commands that work with RtsProfile files require rtsprofile 2.0. It must be installed for these commands to function/

rtshell uses the new string formatting operations that were introduced in Python 2.6. It will not function with an earlier version of Python. It has not been tested with Python 3 and it is likely that several changes will be necessary to make it function using this version of Python.

rtprint, rtinject and rtlog require the Python version of OpenRTM-aist.

For Ubuntu users, if you are using a version of Ubuntu prior to 9.04, you will need to install a suitable Python version by hand. You may want to consider upgrading to Ubuntu 9.04 or later (10.04 offers LTS).

Installation

There are several methods of installation available:

1. Download the source from either the repository (see “Repository,” below) or a source archive, extract it somewhere, and run the commands from that directory.

2. Download the source from either the repository (see “Repository,” below) or a source archive, extract it somewhere, and install it into your Python distribution:

a) Extract the source, e.g. to a directory ~/rtshell::

  $ cd /home/blurgle/src/
  $ tar -xvzf rtshell-3.0.0.tar.gz

b) Run setup.py to install rtshell to your default Python
installation::

 $ python setup.py install

c) If necessary, set environment variables. These should be set by
default, but if not you will need to set them yourself. On Windows,
you will need to ensure that your Python site-packages directory is
in the PYTHONPATH variable and the Python scripts directory is in
the PATH variable.  Typically, these will be something like
``C:\Python26\Lib\site-packages\`` and ``C:\Python26\Scripts\``,
respectively (assuming Python 2.6 installed in ``C:\Python26\``).

1. Use the Windows installer. This will perform the same job as running setup.py (see #2), but saves opening a command prompt. You may still need to add paths to your environment variables (see step c, above).

2. In non-Windows operating systems, you must source the shell support file to gain full functionaliy. Amongst other things, rtcwd will not work without sourcing this file. You can find this file at ${prefix}/share/rtshell/shell_support (${prefix} is the directory where you installed rtshell). You can source it by running

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