Document (and/or fix) the different ways tools parse numeric arguments

[follower]

There are a number of issues related to the parsing of numeric arguments which would benefit from fixing and/or documenting:

• Incorrect documentation
• Inconsistent parsing
• Lack of documentation

Incorrect documentation

The rs-canopen-ds401 tool has useful documentation here and it would be helpful to replicate for the other tools:

libcanopen/bin/rs-canopen-ds401.c

Lines 39 to 45 in 6e4758b

	fprintf(stderr, "usage: rs-canopen-ds401 INTERFACE NODE COMMAND DEVICE ADDRESS [VALUE]\n");
	fprintf(stderr, "\tINTERFACE = can0 | can1 | ...\n");
	fprintf(stderr, "\tNODE\t = 0 .. 127\n");
	fprintf(stderr, "\tCOMMAND\t = read | write\n");
	fprintf(stderr, "\tDEVICE\t = di | do\n");
	fprintf(stderr, "\tADDRESS\t = 0 .. 3\n");
	fprintf(stderr, "\tVALUE\t = 0 | 1 [only for COMMAND = write]\n");

Except that it gives the NODE ID range as 0 .. 127 (implied to be a decimal/base 10 number) when the argument is actually parsed as hexadecimal:

libcanopen/bin/rs-canopen-ds401.c

Lines 81 to 82 in 6e4758b

	node = strtol(argv[2], NULL, 16);
	address = atoi(argv[5]);

Inconsistent parsing

The rs-canopen-nmt tool uses atoi() to parse the Node ID argument as a decimal/base 10 number:

libcanopen/bin/rs-canopen-nmt.c

Line 116 in 6e4758b

node = atoi(argv[3]);

But all the other tools use strol() to parse the Node ID (and other numeric arguments) as a hexadecimal/base 16 number:

libcanopen/bin/rs-canopen-node-info.c

Line 77 in 6e4758b

node = strtol(argv[2], NULL, 16);

libcanopen/bin/rs-canopen-pdo-download.c

Lines 71 to 75 in 6e4758b

	node = strtol(argv[2], NULL, 16);
	index = strtol(argv[3], NULL, 16);
	subindex = strtol(argv[4], NULL, 16);
	data = strtol(argv[5], NULL, 16);
	len = strlen(argv[5])/2;

libcanopen/bin/rs-canopen-pdo-upload.c

Lines 69 to 71 in 6e4758b

	node = strtol(argv[2], NULL, 16);
	index = strtol(argv[3], NULL, 16);
	subindex = strtol(argv[4], NULL, 16);

libcanopen/bin/rs-canopen-sdo-download.c

Lines 71 to 74 in 6e4758b

	node = strtol(argv[2], NULL, 16);
	index = strtol(argv[3], NULL, 16);
	subindex = strtol(argv[4], NULL, 16);
	len = strlen(argv[5])/2;

libcanopen/bin/rs-canopen-sdo-upload.c

Lines 72 to 74 in 6e4758b

	node = strtol(argv[2], NULL, 16);
	index = strtol(argv[3], NULL, 16);
	subindex = strtol(argv[4], NULL, 16);

Lack of documentation

With the exception of rs-canopen-ds401 all the other tools don't document the format/range of their numeric arguments in their usage message. It would be helpful to document this.

Related:

• "Document/improve how data argument length/size is calculated #9"
• "Need to document that SEG mode argument is available for SDO upload tool. #6"

In part I've created this issue to document these details for people until any changes are added to the code base.