NAME

       gpsfake - test harness for gpsd, simulating a GPS

SYNOPSIS

       gpsfake [-1] [-h] [-b] [-f] [-c interval] [-i] [-D debuglevel] [-l] [-m monitor] [-g] [-n]
               [-o options] [-p] [-P port] [-r initcmd] [-s speed] [-u] [-v] [logfile...]

DESCRIPTION

       gpsfake is a test harness for gpsd and its clients. It opens a pty (pseudo-TTY), launches
       a gpsd instance that thinks the slave side of the pty is its GPS device, and repeatedly
       feeds the contents of one or more test logfiles through the master side to the GPS. If
       there are multiple logfiles, sentences from them are interleaved in the order the files
       are specified.

       gpsfake does not require root privileges, and can be run concurrently with a production
       gpsd instance without causing problems.

       The logfiles may contain packets in any supported format, including in particular NMEA,
       SiRF, TSIP, or Zodiac. Leading lines beginning with # will be treated as comments and
       ignored, except in the following special cases:

       •   a comment of the form #Date: yyyy-mm-dd (ISO8601 date format) may be used to set the
           initial date for the log.

       •   a comment of the form #Serial: [0-9]* [78][NOE][12] may be used to set serial
           parameters for the log - baud rate, word length, stop bits.

       •   a comment of the form #Transport: UDP may be used to fake a UDP source rather than the
           normal pty.

       The gpsd instance is run in foreground. The thread sending fake GPS data to the daemon is
       run in background.

OPTIONS

       With the -1 option, the logfile is interpreted once only rather than repeatedly. This
       option is intended to facilitate regression testing.

       The -b enables a twirling-baton progress indicator on standard error. At termination, it
       reports elapsed time.

       The -c sets the delay between sentences in seconds. Fractional values of seconds are
       legal. The default is zero (no delay).

       The -l makes the program dump a line or packet number just before each sentence is fed to
       the daemon. If the sentence is textual (e.g. NMEA), the text is dumped as well. If not,
       the packet will be dumped in hexadecimal (except for RTCM packets, which aren't dumped at
       all). This option is useful for checking that gpsfake is getting packet boundaries right.

       The -i is for single-stepping through logfiles. It dumps the line or packet number (and
       the sentence if the protocol is textual) followed by "? ". Only when the user keys Enter
       is the line actually fed to gpsd.

       The -m specifies a monitor program inside which the daemon should be run. This option is
       intended to be used with valgrind(1), gdb(1) and similar programs.

       The -g uses the monitor facility to run the gpsd instance within gpsfake under control of
       gdb.

       The -f configures gpsd to bind to a random dynamic/private port (range 49152 - 65535). Its
       main use is within regression-test scripts so they won't collide with a production
       instance.

       The -o specifies options to pass to the daemon. The -n option passes -n to start the
       daemon reading the GPS without waiting for a client (equivalent to -o "-n"). The -D passes
       a -D option to the daemon: thus -D 4 is shorthand for -o "-D 4".

       The -p ("pipe") option sets watcher mode and dumps the NMEA and GPSD notifications
       generated by the log to standard output. This is useful for regression-testing.

       The -P ("port") option sets the daemon's listening port.

       The -r specifies an initialization command to use in pipe mode. The default is
       ?WATCH={"enable":true,"json":true}.

       The -s sets the baud rate for the slave tty. The default is 4800.

       The -u forces the test framework to use UDP rather than pty devices. This may be useful
       for testing from within chroot jails where access to pty devices is locked out.

       The -v enables verbose progress reports to stderr. It is mainly useful for debugging
       gpsfake itself.

       The -x dumps packets as gpsfake gathers them. It is mainly useful for debugging gpsfake
       itself.

       The -h makes gpsfake print a usage message and exit.

       The argument must be the name of a file containing the data to be cycled at the device.
       gpsfake will print a notification each time it cycles.

       Normally, gpsfake creates a pty for each logfile and passes the slave side of the device
       to the daemon. If the header comment in the logfile contains the string "UDP", packets are
       instead shipped via UDP port 5000 to the address 192.168.0.1.255. You can monitor them
       with this: tcpdump -s0 -n -A -i lo udp and port 5000.

CUSTOM TESTS

       gpsfake is a trivial wrapper around a Python module, also named gpsfake, that can be used
       to fully script sessions involving a gpsd instance, any number of client sessions, and any
       number of fake GPSes feeding the daemon instance with data from specified sentence logs.

       Source and embedded documentation for this module is shipped with the gpsd development
       tools. You can use it to torture-test either gpsd itself or any gpsd-aware client
       application.

       Logfiles for the use with gpsfake can be retrieved using gpspipe, gpscat, or gpsmon from
       the gpsd distribution, or any other application which is able to create a compatible
       output.

       If gpsfake exits with "Cannot execute gpsd: executable not found." the environment
       variable GPSD_HOME can be set to the path where gpsd can be found. (instead of adding that
       folder to the PATH environment variable

SEE ALSO

       gpsd(8), gps(1), libgps(3), libgpsd(3), gpsctl(1), gpspipe(1), gpsprof(1)gpsmon(1).

AUTHOR

       Eric S. Raymond <esr@thyrsus.com>.