Wallet Tools #549

Added walletchangepass.py and walletunlock.py to contrib/wallettools.

These are two simple python scripts which send the appropriate RPC commands to unlock a wallet and change a wallet password. They are intended to prevent users from having to enter their password as a command-line argument which could then be stored in the console buffer/history in plaintext.

Both tools rely on bitcoin/bitcoind running with server=1 and an rpcuser and rpcpassword set in bitcoin.conf. They can be easily modified for non-standard ports. walletunlock.py unlocks the wallet for 60 seconds by default, changeable in code, and both modules rely upon python-json-rpc (http://json-rpc.org/wiki/python-json-rpc)

Signed-off-by: David Perry enmaku@gmail.com

I think this could (and should) easily turned into a more general client. e.g. one that knows how many arguments bitcoin expects (can this be queried via RPC?) and asks for each argument. A blank value for optional arguments will use the default value for all following optional arguments. A first version could just ask for arguments arg1...argn and send execute the RPC when a blank value is entered.

$ bitcoin-rpc sendfrom
account> foo
address> 1Jkas....
amount> 3.14
minconf (optional)>  (return)
543edaf....

$ bitcoin-rpc walletpassphrase
passphrase> na83klam...
timeout> 30
...

Happy to do the work (when I can find the time) but I have no idea what can be queried via RPC like this. If anyone has an answer (and perhaps some snippet of sample code?) I'd be happy to modify.

https://github.com/enmaku/bitcoin/tree/master/contrib/bitrpc

Supports all the basic commands. I'm sure there's an easier way to run the command in sys.argv[1] without such tremendously long branching but I'm not familiar enough with ServiceProxy. If anyone knows I'd appreciate it.

Maybe we need to add a meta-RPC call that returns (in a machine-parseable format) all supported RPC calls and their argument types, so tools like this do not need to be be updated everytime an RPC call is added?

The output of help can already be parsed. Mandotary arguments are enclosed in <>, optional arguments in []. Lists (sendmany) are enclosed in {}

I guess my real question is how to use json-rpc's ServiceProxy more dynamically. For example, I create a ServiceProxy object called "access" and then I can run things like "access.getinfo()" - how can I run something like getinfo() dynamically without already knowing what the procedure is called? Is there some special function like SQL's "exec" that would allow me to do something like "access.exec("getinfo()")" or similar?