Simple shell
The simple shell
The simple shell is a good compromise between functionality and the size of the eLua firmware image. A detailed description of the shell commands is given below.
help
By itself, it shows a list of all shell commands. If a shell command is given after help, it displays detailed information about the given command. Examples:
# help # help ls
ver
Print the version of the eLua image installed on the board. If the image is not an official one, an abbreviation of the git SHA1 revision used for building the image will be shown in the version number.
recv
Allows you to receive from the PC running the terminal emulator program, a Lua file (either source or compiled bytecode) via XMODEM and either execute it on your board or save it to a file. To use this feature, your eLua target image must be built with support for XMODEM (see building for details). Also, your terminal emulation program must support sending files via the XMODEM protocol. Both XMODEM with checksum and XMODEM with CRC are supported, but only XMODEM with 128 byte packets is allowed (XMODEM with 1K packets won’t work).
To start the transfer, enter recv at the shell prompt. eLua will respond with "Waiting for file …". At this point you can send the file to the eLua board via XMODEM. eLua will receive and execute the file. Don’t worry when you see C characters suddenly appearing on your terminal after you enter this command, this is how the XMODEM transfer is initiated. If you want to save the data to a file instead of executing it, use recv <filename> instead.
Since XMODEM is a protocol that uses serial lines, this command is not available if you’re running your console over TCP/IP instead of a serial link. If you’d like to send compiled bytecode to eLua instead of source code, please check this section first. Examples:
$ recv $ recv /mmc/temp.lua
lua
This command allows you to start the Lua interpreter, optionally passing command line parameters, just as you would do from a desktop machine. There are some differences from the desktop Lua version in command line parsing:
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the command line can’t be longer than 50 chars
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character escaping is not implemented. For example, the next command won’t work because of the ' (simple quotes) escape sequences:
eLua# lua -e 'print(\'Hello, World!\')' -i Press CTRL+Z to exit Lua lua: (command line):1: unexpected symbol near ''
However, if you use both '' (simple quotes) and "" (double quotes) for string quoting, it will work:
eLua# lua -e 'print("Hello, World")' -i Press CTRL+Z to exit Lua Lua 5.1.4 Copyright (C) 1994-2008 Lua.org, PUC-Rio Hello, World -
if you want to execute a file from the ROM file system (or from another file system), remember to prefix it with /rom. For example, to execute hello.lua, do this:
eLua# lua /rom/hello.lua
ls or dir
Shows a list of all the files in the file systems used by eLua, as well as their size and the total size of the given file system.
cat or type
Prints the content of (usually text) files on the console. Examples:
eLua# cat /rom/test.lua /mmc/temp.txt eLua# cat /mmc/autorun.lua
cp
Copies a file to another file. This command can be used to copy files between different file systems (for example between the MMC file system and the RFS file system). The first argument is the source, the second one is the destination. Example:
eLua# cp /rom/data.bin /rfs/data.bin
Note that both source and destination must be file names (for example, cp /rom/data.bin /rfs will not work, since /rfs is not a valid file name).
exit
Exits the shell. This only makes sense if eLua is compiled with terminal support over TCP/IP , as it closes the telnet session to the eLua board. Otherwise it just terminates the shell and blocks forever until you reset your board.
wofmt
"Formats" the WOFS file system, erasing its current contents. The user is asked to confirm this operation.
mkdir
Creates a new directory. The filesystem must have directory support in order fir this to work. Example:
elua# mkdir /mmc/dir