IRC IT (II)

ii is a minimalist FIFO and filesystem-based IRC client. It creates an irc directory tree with server, channel and nick name directories. In every directory a FIFO in file and a normal out file is created.

The in file is used to communicate with the servers and the out files contain the server messages. For every channel and every nick name there are related in and out files created. This allows IRC communication from command line and adheres to the Unix philosophy. example

Join a channel as follows: $ echo "/j #wmii" > in and ii creates a new #wmii (channel) directory with in and out files.

irc/irc.oftc.net
|-- #wmii
|   |-- in
|   `-- out
|-- #ii
|   |-- in
|   `-- out
|-- #wmii
|   |-- in
|   `-- out
|-- chanserv
|   `-- out
|-- nickserv
|   |-- in
|   `-- out
|-- out
`-- in

It consists of <= 500 lines of code and is the big brother of sic

Download

Development

You can browse its source code repository or get a copy using Mercurial with following command:

hg clone http://code.suckless.org/hg/ii

Usage

To make ii a bit more comfortable use it in combination with the multitail program and for example with vim. Run vim in the server directory and use key mapping like: map w1 :.w >> \\#ii/in<cr> map w2 :.w >> \\#wmii/in<cr> to post to channels. Thanks to Matthias Kopfermann for this hint.

Another cool thing is to use it with splitvt so you have multitail windows on top and for example four lines of vim at the bottom.

There is also a blog entry which describes the whole configuration: http://nion.modprobe.de/blog/archives/440-Using-the-ii-irc-client.html

Alternatives:

Tools

  • iicol - ii log colouriser

Web frontend

phpii is a simple web frontend for ii. You can see a demo of it and download the php source here: phpii homepage

Bots

Its also very easy to write shell script based bots with ii. As a short example look at this:

tail -f \\#<CHANNEL>/out |  
while read foo ; do  
    name=$(echo $foo | awk '{print $2}' | sed 's,<\\(.*\\)>,\\1,')  
    if awk 'BEGIN{srand(); exit rand()<.1)}' ; then  
        echo "$name: WHAT??" ;  
    fi;  
done

Its just spamming a channel but I guess your imagination is boundless. I also heard about people using it together with nagios to get the notifications into IRC. Remember to strip input for example with tr(1), tr -cd "0-9a-zA-Z" for example would only allow numbers and characters.

If you want to see a live demonstration of a bot written for ii, join #grml on freenode, the grml-tips bot which searches for grml tips and gives a link or error messages is written in 45 lines of /bin/sh. No, I will not publish the code since I really suck in shell programming :)

Stat scripts

If you want to use for example pisg to generate channel stats this will also work if you choose the irssi log format.

Automatic reconnects

If you want some kind of automatic reconnects in ii you can make a something like this in a shell script:

while true ; do  
    ( sleep 5 && echo "/j #ii" > ~/irc/irc.oftc.net/in ) &  
    ii -s irc.oftc.net -n iifoo -f "John Doe"  
done

IPv6

There is no official IPv6 support included but there is a patch by Alexander Clouter to enable IPv6:
IPv6 patch by Alexander Clouter

bots for irc it (ii)

nagios

Simple Perl script "nagios_post.pl" as interface between Nagios and ii:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

my $users = "your_nickname(s)";
my $pipe = "$ENV{HOME}/irc/your_irc_server/#your_channel/in';
my %color = (
   red    => "\0034",
   purple => "\0036",
   yellow => "\0038",
   clear  => "\00315",
   blue   => "\0032\002",
   green  => "\0033",
   normal => "\0031",
   );

open(PIPE, '>', $pipe) or die "Can't write to $pipe: $!";
while (<>) {
      s/Host [a-z0-9_.]+ is down/$color{red}$&$color{normal}/i;
      s/PROBLEM.*?CRITICAL/$color{red}$&$color{normal}/i;

      s/PROBLEM.*?WARNING/$color{yellow}$&$color{normal}/i;
      s/Host [a-z0-9_.]+ is up/$color{green}$&$color{normal}/i;

      s/RECOVERY.*?OK/$color{green}$&$color{normal}/i;

      print PIPE "$users: $_";
}
close(PIPE);

The appropriate Nagios configuration looks like this:

# 'notify-by-irc' command definition
define command{
        command_name    notify-by-irc
        command_line    /usr/bin/printf "%b" "$TIME$ $NOTIFICATIONTYPE$ $HOSTNAME$/$SERVICEDESC$ $SERVICESTATE$ $SERVICEOUTPUT$\n" | /home/nagios/bin/nagios_post.pl 
       }

# 'host-notify-by-irc' command-notification
define command{
        command_name    host-notify-by-irc
        command_line    /usr/bin/printf "%b" "$TIME$ Host $HOSTALIAS$ is $HOSTSTATE$ -- $HOSTOUTPUT$\n" | /home/nagios/bin/nagios_post.pl
       }

Start ii appropriately and add notify-by-irc and host-notify-by-irc to the appropriate "service_notification_commands" and "host_notification_commands" -- and you have your own Nagios IRC bot.

rsstail

Just piping the output of rsstail into the fifo "in" should work. More detailed examples are welcome.

Contact

send mail to ii@modprobe.de or feel free to join #ii on irc.oftc.net