Practical Asterisk 1.4 and 1.6: From Beginner to Expert

15. External Control of Asterisk

One of Asterisk’s biggest advantages is the ability it gives the administrator to control it from the shell or through external applications.

15.1 asterisk -rx “command”

The simplest way to control Asterisk from an external shell or application is to issue the command asterisk with the option -rx followed by the CLI command. Any CLI command may be entered from the system shell in this fashion.

Say you want to see the dialplan for extension 23 in the context [my-phones]; you would do this with asterisk -rx "dialplan show 23@my-phones” entered in the shell:

15.2 Call Files

Call files are like a shell script for ...