Ratcat
A tool similar to netcat that allows you to interact with a Ratman
network from various scripts and small programs.
Before you can send messages you need to call ratcat with the
--register flag. This will register a new address with your local
router. Afterwards you can send and receive messages.
Sending messages
ratcat will read a message either from the commandline arguments or
from standard input. In either case, the first required parameter is
always a recipient.
A recipient is a Ratman address, which has the following format:
ECB4-30B9-4416-C403-716F-601F-FC56-9AD3-BD2E-3892-227A-84AD-E6FC-A1CE-0A92-03F6
So to send a short message to this address you would call:
$ echo "Hello ECB4... do you have a nickname?" | ratcat 'ECB4-30B9-4416-C403-716F-601F-FC56-9AD3-BD2E-3892-227A-84AD-E6FC-A1CE-0A92-03F6'
Receiving messages
ratcat can also be set to receive messages. For this simply provide
the --recv flag. This will wait forever and print messages (or to
standard output if a pipe is connected). You can limit this behaviour
with --count which takes a number as argument.
For example, the following invocation will wait for an incoming
message and then pipe the resulting output into json_pp. Any errors
or warnings are printed to standard error.
$ ratcat --recv --count 1 | json_pp
You can also combine message sending with receiving (simply call
--recv after the recipient/ message info)
State
ratcat stores your last registered address in:
- Linux/ BSD/ XDG system:
$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/ratcat/config. - macOS:
/Users/[USER_NAME]/Library/Application Support/org.irdest.ratcat.