1NEWHELP(1) General Commands Manual NEWHELP(1)
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6 newhelp - generate a performance metrics help database
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9 $PCP_BINADM_DIR/newhelp [-V] [-n pmnsfile] [-o outputfile] [-v version]
10 [file ...]
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13 newhelp generates the Performance Co-Pilot help text files used by Per‐
14 formance Metric Domain Agents (PMDAs).
15 Normally newhelp operates on the default Performance Metrics Name Space
17 (PMNS), however if the -n option is specified an alternative namespace
18 is loaded from the file pmnsfile.
19 When there is only one input file, the base name of the new database is
21 derived from the name of the input file, otherwise the -o flag must be
22 given to explicitly name the database. If no input files are supplied,
23 newhelp reads from the standard input stream, in which case the -o flag
24 must be given.
25 If the output file name is determined to be foo, newhelp will create
27 foo.dir and foo.pag.
28 Although historically there have been multiple help text file formats,
30 the only format currently supported using the -v option is version 2,
31 and this is the default if no -v flag is provided.
32 The -V flag causes verbose messages to be printed while newhelp is
34 parsing its input.
35 The first line of each entry in a help source file consists of an ``@''
37 character beginning the line followed by a space and then the perfor‐
38 mance metric name and a one line description of the metric. Following
39 lines (up to the next line beginning with ``@'' or end of file) may
40 contain a verbose help description. E.g.
41 #
43 # This is an example of newhelp's input syntax
44 #
45 @ kernel.all.cpu.idle CPU idle time
46 A cumulative count of the number of milliseconds
47 of CPU idle time, summed over all processors.
48 Three-part numeric metric identifiers (PMIDs) may be used in place of
50 metric names, e.g. 60.0.23 rather than kernel.all.cpu.idle in the exam‐
51 ple above. Other than for dynamic metrics (where the existence of a
52 metric is known to a PMDA, but not visible in the PMNS and hence has no
53 name that could be known to newhelp) use of this syntactic variant is
54 not encouraged.
55 Lines beginning with ``#'' are ignored, as are blank lines in the file
57 before the first ``@''. The verbose help text is optional.
58 As a special case, a ``metric'' name of the form NNN.MM (for numeric
60 NNN and MM) is interpreted as an instance domain identification, and
61 the text describes the instance domain.
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64 $PCP_VAR_DIR/pmns/*
65 default PMNS specification files
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68 Environment variables with the prefix PCP_ are used to parameterize the
69 file and directory names used by PCP. On each installation, the file
70 /etc/pcp.conf contains the local values for these variables. The
71 $PCP_CONF variable may be used to specify an alternative configuration
72 file, as described in pcp.conf(5).
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75 chkhelp(1), PMAPI(3), pmLookupInDomText(3), pmLookupText(3),
76 pcp.conf(5) and pcp.env(5).
77Performance Co-Pilot PCP NEWHELP(1)