Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Eric Norum <[email protected]> · Wed, 11 Jun 2008 08:42:52 -0500

On Jun 11, 2008, at 6:30 AM, Matthew Pearson wrote:

Hi,
In the IOC applications developers guide, chapter 21, there are two
ways

described for registering IOC shell functions. I'm having trouble

getting one of them working on Linux...
In the source file, I have:
epicsRegisterFunction(directoryWaitDef);
and in the included dbd file, I have:
function(directoryWaitDef)

The above mechanism is for registering the function name so that it
can be used for things like subroutine record INAM or SNAM fields.

It does not register the function as an iocsh command.

I then build a static library containing the function.
When I build the IOC, the function seems to be built OK into the
executable. If I look inside it, I see:
nm -S bin/linux-x86/BL19I-MO-SIM-01 | grep directory
0804c44c 0000009f T directoryWaitDef
0804e74c 00000004 D pvar_func_register_func_directoryWaitDef
0804c4ec 0000002a t register_func_directoryWaitDef
However, when I start the IOC, the function isn't found.
I'm using EPICS 3.14.8.2.
The same procedure works fine when I build the same IOC for VxWorks.
It isn't a huge problem, because the other method described in the

manual works for my Linux IOC (using the registrar() function in the
dbd

file). But the method above is significantly simpler in the source
code.

The long-winded approach is the only way to register a function with
the IOC shell. The payback for the extra work is that:

1) the iocsh help command can provide a little information about the
arguments.

2) you don't need to be so careful quoting string arguments.

3) you can have floating-point arguments and not have to worry about
including a decimal point.

Any ideas?

The CEXP library provides the ability to invoke arbitrary functions.
No registration necessary. If you're familiar with the vxWorks shell
environment you'll find CEXP provides much of the same experience.
--
Eric Norum <[email protected]>
Advanced Photon Source
Argonne National Laboratory
(630) 252-4793

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System