xmlrpc is a general purpose XML-RPC client program. It performs one XML-RPC call, which you describe in its command line arguments.
$ xmlrpc http://localhost:8080/RPC2 sample.add i/3 i/5
Result:
Integer: 8
$ xmlrpc localhost:8080 sample.add i/3 i/5
Result:
Integer: 8
$ xmlrpc http://xmlrpc.example.com/~bryanh echostring \
"s/This is a string"
Result:
String: This is a string
$ xmlrpc http://xmlrpc.example.com/~bryanh echostring \
"This is a string in shortcut syntax"
Result:
String: This is a string in shortcut syntax
$ xmlrpc localhost:8080 foo 'array/(i/3,i/5,s/hello)' \
'struct/{width:d/8.5,height:d/11}'
Result:
Nil
$ xmlrpc localhost:8080 foo 'array/(s/hello\(goodbye\))'
Result:
Nil
$ xmlrpc http://xmlrpc.example.com sample.add i/3 i/5 \
transport=curl -curlinterface=eth1 -username=bryanh -password=passw0rd
Result:
Integer: 8
xmlrpc makes an XML-RPC remote procedure call (RPC) and displays the response. xmlrpc runs an XML-RPC client.
You specify the RPC parameters with command line arguments (See parameter under Arguments).
Each argument to xmlrpc describes on XML-RPC parameter. So in a typical command shell, the following would make an XML-RPC call with two parameters: "hello" and "see you later":
$ xmlrpc http://www.xmlrpc.com/RPC2 mymethod s/hello "s/see you later"
Note that this is an example of a Bourne shell command, so some of the characters (most notably the quotation marks) are part of the shell language, not the xmlrpc syntax.
$ xmlrpc http://www.oreillynet.com/meerkat/xml-rpc/server.php \
meerkat.getItems \
"struct/{search:linux,descriptions:i/76,time_period:12hour}"
Result:
Array:
Struct:
title: String: DatabaseJournal: OpenEdge-Based Finance ...
link: String: http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=...
description: String: "Finance application with embedded ...
Struct:
title: ...
link: ...
description: ...
$ xmlrpc localhost:8080 array_processing_method \
"array/(i/3,i/49,s/hello,array/(i/-10,i/-9))"
xmlrpc is implemented using the Xmlrpc-c client library, but its function is not in any way tied to Xmlrpc-c. It makes a standard XML-RPC call and does not know or care whether the server is implemented with Xmlrpc-c or not.
For extra diagnostic information, use the XMLRPC_TRACE_XML environment variable so you can see the XML that goes back and forth to perform the call. (This is not specifically xmlrpc function -- it's tracing function that's automatically there because xmlrpc uses libxmlrpc_client).
xmlrpc from Xmlrpc-c before Release 1.16 doesn't work on some platforms — it crashes because of invalid assumptions it makes about the way C variadic functions are implemented.
xmlrpc url methodName parameter ... [-transport=transportname] [-username=username -password=password] [-curlinterface={interface|host}] [-curlnoverifypeer] [-curlnoverifyhost]
parameter:
i/integer | s/string | h/hexstring | b/{true|false|t|f} | d/realnum | n/ | string
Minimum unique abbreviation of option is acceptable. You may use double hyphens instead of single hyphen to denote options. You may use white space in place of the equals sign to separate an option name from its value.
The port number defaults to 80 (the standard http service).
Examples:
Examples:
You specify the data type of the parameter with a prefix ending in a slash. Example: i/5. Here, the "i" signifies an integer data type. "5" is the value.
xmlrpc is capable of only a subset of the possible XML-RPC types, as follows by prefix:
The parenthesis, brace, comma, colon, and backslash characters are special. If you want to include one in a string value, escape it with a backslash.
struct/{width:d/8.5,height:d/11}
You can nest complex types, for example: struct/{width:d/8.5,height:d/11,colors:array/(blue,green,red)}
array/(i/3,i/5,s/hello)
You can nest complex types, for example: array/(i/3,array/(d/3.5, d/2.0),i/5,s/hello)
As a shortcut, if you don't specify a prefix (i.e. your argument does not contain a slash), xmlrpc assumes string data type.
xmlrpc cannot generate a parameter of datetime type.
The name transportname is one that the Xmlrpc-c programming library recognizes. This is typically libwww, curl, and wininet.
By default, xmlrpc lets the Xmlrpc-c library choose.
The exact meaning of this option is up to the Curl library, and the best documentation for it is the manual for the 'curl' program that comes with the Curl library.
But essentially, it chooses the local network interface through which to send the RPC. It causes the Curl library to perform a "bind" operation on the socket it uses for the communication. It can be the name of a network interface (e.g. on Linux, "eth1") or an IP address of the interface or a host name that resolves to the IP address of the interface. Unfortunately, you can't explicitly state which form you're specifying, so there's some ambiguity.
Examples:
This option causes xmlrpc to default to using the Curl XML transport. You may not specify any other transport.
See the curl_easy_setopt() man page for details on this, but essentially it means that the client does not authenticate the server's certificate of identity -- it just believes whatever the server says.
You may want to use -curlnoverifyhost as well. Since you're not authenticating the server's identity, there's not much sense in checking it.
This option causes xmlrpc to default to using the Curl XML transport. You may not specify any other transport.
See the curl_easy_setopt() man page for details on this, but essentially it means that the client does not verify the server's identity. It just assumes that if the server answers the IP address of the server as indicated by the URL (probably via host name), then it's the intended server.
You may want to use -curlnoverifypeer as well. As long as you don't care who the server says it is, there's no point in authenticating its identity.
This option causes xmlrpc to default to using the Curl XML transport. You may not specify any other transport.
The Xmlrpc-c libraries place a limit on the size of a response they will accept from the server to protect the rest of the program that uses the libraries from running out of memory. This option overrides the library default limit, which is 512K.
This option was new in Xmlrpc-c 1.55 (June 2019).
If you run xmlrpc in an environment in which programs get their arguments encoded some way other than UTF-8, xmlrpc will generate garbage for the XML-RPC call and display garbage for the XML-RPC response. Typically, you control this aspect of the environment with a LANG environment variable. One safe value for LANG is "C".