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NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | FILES | PCP ENVIRONMENT | SEE ALSO | COLOPHON |
NEWHELP(1) General Commands Manual NEWHELP(1)
newhelp - generate a performance metrics help database
$PCP_BINADM_DIR/newhelp [-V] [-n pmnsfile] [-o outputfile] [-v
version] [file ...]
newhelp generates the Performance Co-Pilot help text files used by
Performance Metric Domain Agents (PMDAs).
Normally newhelp operates on the default Performance Metrics Name
Space (PMNS), however if the -n option is specified an alternative
namespace is loaded from the file pmnsfile.
When there is only one input file, the base name of the new database
is derived from the name of the input file, otherwise the -o flag
must be given to explicitly name the database. If no input files are
supplied, newhelp reads from the standard input stream, in which case
the -o flag must be given.
If the output file name is determined to be foo, newhelp will create
foo.dir and foo.pag.
Although historically there have been multiple help text file
formats, the only format currently supported using the -v option is
version 2, and this is the default if no -v flag is provided.
The -V flag causes verbose messages to be printed while newhelp is
parsing its input.
The first line of each entry in a help source file consists of an
``@'' character beginning the line followed by a space and then the
performance metric name and a one line description of the metric.
Following lines (up to the next line beginning with ``@'' or end of
file) may contain a verbose help description. E.g.
#
# This is an example of newhelp's input syntax
#
@ kernel.all.cpu.idle CPU idle time
A cumulative count of the number of milliseconds
of CPU idle time, summed over all processors.
Three-part numeric metric identifiers (PMIDs) may be used in place of
metric names, e.g. 60.0.23 rather than kernel.all.cpu.idle in the
example above. Other than for dynamic metrics (where the existence
of a metric is known to a PMDA, but not visible in the PMNS and hence
has no name that could be known to newhelp) use of this syntactic
variant is not encouraged.
Lines beginning with ``#'' are ignored, as are blank lines in the
file before the first ``@''. The verbose help text is optional.
As a special case, a ``metric'' name of the form NNN.MM (for numeric
NNN and MM) is interpreted as an instance domain identification, and
the text describes the instance domain.
$PCP_VAR_DIR/pmns/*
default PMNS specification files
Environment variables with the prefix PCP_ are used to parameterize
the file and directory names used by PCP. On each installation, the
file /etc/pcp.conf contains the local values for these variables.
The $PCP_CONF variable may be used to specify an alternative
configuration file, as described in pcp.conf(5).
chkhelp(1), PMAPI(3), pmLookupInDomText(3), pmLookupText(3),
pcp.conf(5) and pcp.env(5).
This page is part of the PCP (Performance Co-Pilot) project.
Information about the project can be found at ⟨http://www.pcp.io/⟩.
If you have a bug report for this manual page, send it to
pcp@oss.sgi.com. This page was obtained from the project's upstream
Git repository ⟨git://git.pcp.io/pcp⟩ on 2017-07-05. If you discover
any rendering problems in this HTML version of the page, or you
believe there is a better or more up-to-date source for the page, or
you have corrections or improvements to the information in this
COLOPHON (which is not part of the original manual page), send a mail
to man-pages@man7.org
Performance Co-Pilot PCP NEWHELP(1)
Pages that refer to this page: chkhelp(1), pmda(3), pmdahelp(3), pmdainit(3), pmdatext(3), pmlookupindomtext(3), pmlookuptext(3)