This utility facilitates the collection of logging/debugging information from programs that were not originally intended to produce logs. daqstart runs a target program. Stdout and stderr of the target program are initialized as pipes that are monitored by the daqstart program. Output on each pipe is collected a line at a time and relayed to daqstarts stdout or stderr as appropriate. If a logging sink has been attached to the standard file, lines are timestamped and logged to that sink as well. This utility is also very useful for programs that are run from desktop shortcuts under window managers such as e.g. kde.
On target program exit, if an error sink is specified, an exit message is logged to the error sink. The exit message contains such information about why the program exited as UNIX can provide (exit status and signal), and is also timestamped.
If the --notify
option is specified, the exit message is also sent to daqstart's
stderr. Additionally, if the DISPLAY environment variable is defined
and the PopUp program is executable in the current path, it is invoked to pop
up an Xwindows dialog with similar information.
Each option has a short and a long form. Short form options are preceded
by a single -. Long options are preceeded by
--. If a value is required, it should be butted up against
short options or separated from long options by an =. For
example: -osomesink and --output=somesink
are equivalent.
-h --helpDisplay short help and exit.
-V --versionPrint program version number and exit
-eSink --error=SinkSpecify a logging sink for the program's standard error output. If specified, lines sent by the program to stderr are timestamped and teed to this sink as well. See SINK SPECIFICATIONS for more information about specifying sinks.
-oSink --output=SinkSpecify a logging sink for the program's standard output output. If specified, lines sent by the program to stdout are timestamped and teed to this sink as well. See SINK SPECIFICATIONS for more information about specifying sinks.
-n --notify
Enables exit notification for the command. If specified, the user is
notified of command exit. Commend exit is always logged to the error
sink. --notify
causes an message to be sent to stderr that includes
the command name, the exit status and, if exit was due to an uncaught
signal, the signal that caused the process to exit. If the environment
variable DISPLAY
is defined and the program PopUp
is in the path, it is
run to produce an X11 pop up message as well.
A sink is specified by a string containing two fields separated by a colon: sinktype:sinkname The left field is the sink type, while the right field is a sink name interpreted within the sink type. For example, the sink specification: file:/user/fox/output.log specifies the sink is a file, and that the file is /user/fox/output.log.
Sink types that are currently supporteed include:
A file. The sink name is the name of the file.
If all this seems like a bit much to specify a file, recall that this is version 1.0 of the program and future versions will probably support other sink types.