Send commands/args to my application from remote SSH connection

Targets macOS
1

I’ve got an application which controls my electric shades through a TCPSocket. My goal is to be able to control them with Siri voice commands. I believe I can do this using Apple Shortcuts using an SSH script. I have my app running on a server on my LAN.

I need some help with methods to talk to my application from SSH using arguments which I can configure to control the various shades. I can figure out the protocol once I’m able to just tunnel into my application.

Any suggestions for getting this happening would be appreciated. Thanks.

2

Edit: Oops, I misunderstood and got that backwards. You’re looking for System.CommandLine to get the arguments.

3

Thanks, Tim. I’ll have to experiment with this. At first glance, it looks like these arguments are passed when an application is launched. My app is always running. I guess I’ll need to study terminal commands a bit more. I need to figure out how to send commands to my app while it’s running. Thanks.

4

Console applications have StandardInputStream which can be read, but desktop applications do not have this ability.

5

I’m now looking at IPCSocket as a possible solution.

6

Another possibility would be to have a companion console app that communicates with your app through a socket (IPC or TCP) or through a shared document folder where you pass in a formatted file like JSON.

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7

I just did some testing using the TCP Server example. I was able to Telnet into it from the Mac terminal. This sounds like the solution I can implement easily, logging in remotely using SSH. I’ll let you know how things work out. Thanks for the suggestions.

8

I solved my problem using a TCP server with the “Listen” method. It only takes a few lines of code. The “Run Script over SSH” shortcut sends commands using nc:

echo Hallway,Up | nc -w 1 127.0.0.1 8235

The 8235 is just a random port number. My App receives the command and moves the shade, in this case the Hallway shade goes up.

Thanks for your help.

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