'\"macro stdmacro
.\"
.\" Copyright (c) 2000 Silicon Graphics, Inc.  All Rights Reserved.
.\" 
.\" This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
.\" under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the
.\" Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your
.\" option) any later version.
.\" 
.\" This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
.\" WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY
.\" or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU General Public License
.\" for more details.
.\" 
.\"
.\"
.TH NEWHELP 1 "PCP" "Performance Co-Pilot"
.SH NAME
\f3newhelp\f1 \- generate a performance metrics help database
.SH SYNOPSIS
\f3$PCP_BINADM_DIR/newhelp\f1
[\f3\-V\f1]
[\f3\-n\f1 \f2pmnsfile\f1]
[\f3\-o\f1 \f2outputfile\f1]
[\f3\-v\f1 \f2version\f1]
[\f2file\f1 ...]
.SH DESCRIPTION
.B newhelp
generates the
Performance Co-Pilot
help text files used by
Performance Metric Domain Agents (PMDAs).
.PP
Normally
.B newhelp
operates on the default Performance Metrics Namespace (PMNS), however
if the
.B \-n
option is specified an alternative namespace is loaded
from the file
.IR pmnsfile .
.PP
When there is only one input file,
the base name of the new database is derived from the name of the input
.IR file ,
otherwise the
.B \-o
flag must be given to explicitly name the database.
If no input files are supplied,
.B newhelp
reads from the standard input stream,
in which case the
.B \-o
flag must be given.
.PP
If the output file name is determined to be
.BR foo ,
.B newhelp
will create
.B foo.dir
and
.BR foo.pag .
.PP
Although historically there have been multiple help text file formats, the only
format currently supported
using the
.B \-v
option is
.I version
2, and
this is the default if no
.B \-v
flag is provided.
.PP
The
.B \-V
flag causes verbose messages to be printed while
.B newhelp
is parsing its input.
.PP
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.
.PP
.ft CW
.nf
.in +0.5i
#
# 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.
.in
.fi
.ft 1
.PP
Three-part numeric metric identifiers (PMIDs) may be used in place of metric names,
e.g. \c
.ft CW
60.0.23
.ft 1
rather than
.ft CW
kernel.all.cpu.idle
.ft 1
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
.IR newhelp )
use of this syntactic variant is not encouraged.
.PP
Lines beginning with ``#''
are ignored, as are blank lines in the file before the first ``@''.
The verbose help text is optional.
.PP
As a special case,
a ``metric'' name of the form 
.I NNN.MM
(for numeric 
.I NNN
and 
.IR MM )
is interpreted as an
instance domain identification,
and the text describes the instance domain.
.SH FILES
.PD 0
.TP 10
.BI $PCP_VAR_DIR/pmns/ *
default PMNS specification files
.PD
.SH "PCP ENVIRONMENT"
Environment variables with the prefix
.B PCP_
are used to parameterize the file and directory names
used by PCP.
On each installation, the file
.I /etc/pcp.conf
contains the local values for these variables.
The
.B $PCP_CONF
variable may be used to specify an alternative
configuration file,
as described in
.BR pcp.conf (5).
.SH SEE ALSO
.BR chkhelp (1),
.BR PMAPI (3),
.BR pmLookupInDomText (3),
.BR pmLookupText (3),
.BR pcp.conf (5)
and
.BR pcp.env (5).