Uplinger,

I was not aware of the GUI RPC, and found the protocol interesting to read about, although I don't think I can utilize it in my particular circumstance.

While I perhaps should have mentioned this earlier (apologies for the initial vagueness), I connect to my linux box (which is running Ubuntu 12.04 desktop) through a Wine TeamViewer program, and so generally have access to the GUI as I'm plodding around on my iPad.

My qualms with the boincmgr program are that I note that it uses approximately 8% of the core it runs on (which I'd like to avoid if possible, despite the short time I leave it open for), and in general I have to go through several steps to assuage my conscience that nothing has melted in my box since the last time I checked up on it (e.g. that tasks have completed, that tasks are currently running, and that there is a bank of unstarted tasks which can occupy the box in the case of a client / server internet outage), which I figured I could just as easily glean from a robust terminal command if one exists.

So far, I find that the "boinccmd --get_tasks" command is as stripped down as the terminal can get, but since I've set my minimum work queue to 1 day and my max additional work queue to 0.5 days, this means paging through some 140 tasks to note the status of the client, which isn't terrible since they're usually ordered from finished->working->unstarted, but which takes more time for me than just starting up the boincmgr and accepting a slight performance drop for the duration during which it is open.

Essentially I may be hoping against hope here, or I may be naively hoping that all things are possible (read: practical for a 3-week newbie to attempt) through Linux, but what I'd ideally like is to be able to run a command or script in the Linux terminal that reports whether there are completed and/or unstarted tasks, and the progress of the working units rather than calling boinccmd --get_tasks | less and paging through the verbose response.

And yes, I realize the efficiency irony of using teamviewer, which grabs for itself about 20% of a CPU core while active, to operate a terminal to avoid using boincmgr which in a worst-case scenario would pull 8% of a CPU core, but just run with me here haha it's the easiest way to manage the box since I'm most often around iPhone or iPad and generally leave the laptop at home (also crunching).

Many thanks for your helpfulness though, and I'm glad to have found out about another facet of remote administration that I hadn't previously known about.

--mg

Hi, I am currently working on this exact problem using python. You can find my solution here:
https://code.google.com/p/py-boinc-plotter/

Note that you do not need to install numpy or matplotlib if you are not interested in the plotting aspects of the program. You will need BeautifulSoup4 with xml support, let me know if that causes problems. As an example from my laptop right now:

> py-boinc-plotter --no-web --no-plot
== World Community Grid ==
Resource share 100%, sched. priority -0.956
Total credit,  user: 300 587, host: 294 955,  98%
Avg credit,    user:   1 201, host:   1 192,  99% 
= The Clean Energy Project - Phase 2 (cep2) =  
E214981_339_C.3... ready to report 100 %          11:27:42  0:00:00  1 day, 18:07:20 localhost          
E215021_997_C.3...         running  19 %           2:19:34 11:03:22  1 day, 18:07:20 localhost  181 MB

The cpu is used only when you ask for a refresh. The output you see is basically the parsed output of the --get_state command.

If you know python (or is willing to learn) you can even make the output even more terse by only printing the number of tasks in the different states or by printing the total (estimated) remaining time.

Depending on your needs you may not need to learn any python at all. (you can browser the web using firefox without knowing C++). Just follow the instructions here:
https://code.google.com/p/py-boinc-plotter/wiki/installation

and let me know where you get stuck.