AIX

Hi all,
I am a DBA , I want to take the output of topas command result in every 1minute to write on the output file. If I redirected the file it attached with some control M characters. Nmon and sar commands are not working. only topas working in my AIX environment.
Please suggest me on this.

Thanks in advance.

Regards,
Kumar

First off, i don't think that topas is a good tool for non-interactive use. My suggestion is to define what you want to know exactly and then achieve this with a collection of tools better suited to batch use, such as vmstat, iostat, ps -Alo vsz,cmd and similar.

In fact the information you want to get are being published by the OS to some interfaces, from which "topas" takes them and presents them to you - like the other mentioned tools too. So "topas" doesn't tell you more than any other tool, just in a different form. One, which is best suited for interactive use and this is not what you have in mind.

So tell us what you want to know and we surely can provide you with a way to get this.

You can of course - if you insist to do so - try to "massage out" all the control characters from the topas-output. This can probably be done by a series of sed-statements, like the following, which would remove the "^M"-characters. Here is how to find and remove these characters.

First, open the raw topas-output in "vi" and press <CTRL>-<i> to display all the non-printing, control-characters in unambiguous form. If you go with the cursor over a "^M" you will notice that it is in fact one character. It is the <CTRL>-<m> key kombination (or <ENTER>, which is in fact the same).

Notice, that you can enter such combinations into "vi" by pressing <CTRL>-<v> in insert mode and then pressing the combination in question.

Now exit the raw file and prepare a small script. Enter the control characters the way i explained above:

Code:

#!/bin/ksh

sed 's/^M//g' /path/to/raw-topas-output > /path/to/output

exit 0

Save this to a file, make it executable and run it. Then look at the output file to find out if this is what you want. Probably there are other control-sequences which you want to remove too (again, <CTRL>-<i> in vi will tell you), say i.e. "^[" (<CTRL>-<ESC>). You will want to extend your script by replacing

Code:

sed 's/^M//g' /path/to/raw-topas-output > /path/to/output

with

Code:

sed 's/^M//g; s/^[//g' /path/to/raw-topas-output > /path/to/output

Again, look at the output and find out if the bothering control characters are gone or if you have to extend your script with yet another statement. Repeat this until you are satisfied, then use your script to process raw topas output into a readable form.

Again, i discourage such a method, because you will probably end with information still not well suited for analysis even if the control characters are out, but here you are.

I hope this helps.

bakunin