[Crash-utility] calling crash from another program (or vice versa)

[James Washer]

Often, I'd like to be able to run one crash command, massage the data
produced, and run follow up commands using the massaged data

A (possibly crazy) example, run the mount command, collect the
superblocks addresses, for each super_block, get the s_inodes list head,
traverse each list head to the inode, for each inode, find it's i_data
(address_space) and get the number of pages.. Now.. sum these up and
print a table of filesystem mounts points and the number of cached pages
for each... Perhaps, I'd even traverse the struct pages to provide a
count of clean and dirty pages for each file system.

I do do this by hand. (i.e. mount > mount.file; perlscript mount.file >
crash-script-step-1, then, back in crash I do ". crash-script-step-1 >
data-file-2; and repeat with more massaging).. This is gross, prone to
error, and not terribly fast.

I'd love to start crash as a child of perl and either use expect (which
is a bit of a hack) or better yet, have some machine interface to crash
(ala gdbmi)...

I know.. it's open source, I should write it myself. I just don't want
to reinvent the wheel, if someone else already has done something like
this.

Perhaps I need to learn sial. But what little sial I've looked at seems
a bit low level for my needs.

Has anyone had much luck using expect with crash?

thanks

 - jim