Re: Data capture from a serial port

Richard Thomas wrote: > > Hi, > > Our call centre runs on a phone system that produces statistics every hour, > and outputs them through a serial port. We have a dot matrix printer connected > to this port that prints this data onto reams of paper. We want to get this > data > into our OnLine database (5.0.3 on SCO 5.0.0) without having to key it in > from the printout. We figure this would save paper, save time, improve > accuracy, prevent paper loss due to jams, paper running out etc. > > The question is, is anyone else capturing data from a serial output, > formatting > it and inserting it into tables. The options open to us are shell scripts, > awk, > SQL, ACE and PERFORM. ie NO 4GL or C/C++ :-( My own preference for this would be to write a filter in C to produce files in Informix LOAD format. Other people would do this in AWK. My preference for C is simply that it's quicker to write a filter in C than to learn AWK! Does "NO C" mean you don't have a C compiler on the system or don't have anyone who knows C? If the former it might be possible to get someone with a SCO development system to compile a filter for you, if the latter, you could always hire a contractor. > Any ideas? > > Cheers, > > Richard. > > PS I need to stop our users logging in on Friday morning (call centre opens > at 8am, I arrive and essential maintenance starts at 9am). Telling them not > to log in doesn't seem to work :-) On Solaris, I seem to remember you > could put a file somewhere called 'nologin' which did exactly what I want. > Can't find any mention of it on SCO. Any ideas, other than threats/ > disconnection of terminals?! One trick I've used, which worked when all the users were put straight into isql -u when they logged in, was to chmod o-x isql. You could do something like this on cron to run before 8am. Ian