\t\t\t\tIf you read this title, how mad do you think I am? Honest!<\/p>\n
Alright, “as you know” (so of course this article only applies to some sort of computer nerds<\/i>), my router is a FRITZ!Box 7270, it’s also the base station for my (wireless) phones, and a lot more … — certainly one of my most important toys or gadgets. And I have 2 of them, one for at home, one for anywhere outside, where I can only connect to the Internet through UMTS.<\/p>\n
So alright, back to the title of this article!<\/p>\n
\nWell, my router is running Linux as its operating system kernel, and BusyBox<\/i> on top of it. On each incoming phone call it runs a shell script with a few parameters, of course the caller’s phone# (if available) and also the callee’s phone#. (I do have more than one phone#, and why not also record the called<\/b> phone#, just for the record?) It tries to associate a name with the caller’s phone#, if there is a matching entry in the phone book.<\/p>\n
Quite a while ago I started implementing such a shell script, and obviously (as it is almost<\/b> an ordinary<\/b> (bash) shell script), I can develop and test it on any of my computers, that can run shell scripts, like any of my openSuSE computers, any WinXP computer running cygwin, a Mac running OS X, … . Yes, I cannot create a full blown<\/b> shell script, I will not pipe a lot through one-liner perl or ruby scripts on my router, but still: it’s a handy and useful, not so tiny shell script.<\/p>\n
So far it appears to me, as if no such executable<\/i> gets called on the router for outgoing<\/b> calls, but I can still mimic this behaviour by calling that script on my main development box.<\/p>\n
Having said this, my script (fritz_box_calllog.sh<\/i>) fulfills all the requirements, that I listed above in that bullet list.
\nFor incoming calls without caller id and\/or without a matching entry in the phone book it creates a piece of XML text, that I can paste into my FRITZ!Box XML phone book, and where I can fill in a phone# and a name or any descriptive text, so next time, I want to dial that phone# myself, I can select it from the phone book. And maybe another time that person will call you with<\/b> caller id, and then you will be able to greet that person with her\/his name. Wouldn’t that be nice?<\/p>\n