As you might have read in my previous post about accessing your cell phone with the AT-commands under Linux.

If not, you might want to start there for a little context.

I finally wrote and released on CPAN a Perl module which will help to automate cell phone operations such as saving/restoring the phonebook or sending an SMS.

Examples are included in the documentation. I believe I made it easy to use, but let me know if I’m wrong .

Features will be added on demand (if possible of course ).

The module is Device::Modem::GSM.

This article explores your options to access your GSM cell phone from a linux system, and manipulate SMS and phonebook entries.

Doesn’t provide hints about how to unlock a GSM cell phone though

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When you perform a pattern matching with multiple “or” (|) clauses, such as /pattern1|pattern2|pattern3/, Perl regexp engine will try to match each of them one after the other in sequence, resulting in poor performance if you have a long list of “or” clauses.

In order to optimize such a pattern matching, you can use the Regexp::Assemble module.

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When you use Linux in text mode (as opposed to with an X server), you readily have access to multiple Virtual Terminals (aka VT for short) by hitting one of your <Alt-Fn> keys (if you are running a X server, you’ll need to hit <Ctrl-Alt-Fn> simultaneously).

This lets you access one of the VTs which are initialized at boot time, but won’t let you create new ones even if your kernel configuration would allow more VTs. Furthermore, what if you want to deal with VTs from a script ?

This post covers the 3 commands which will let you control your VTs from the command line or from a script.

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