NAME

       gspl-ripc - trace and clean GNUspool IPC facilities

SYNOPSIS

       gspl-ripc [ -d ] [ -r ] [ -F ] [ -A ] [ -D secs ] [ -P psarg ] [ -G ] [ -n ] [ -o file ] [
       -S dir ] [ -x ] [ -B n ] [ -N char ]

DESCRIPTION

       gspl-ripc traces, monitors problems with or deletes IPC facilities used by GNUspool. Many
       of the facilities are used for debugging, but it also serves as a quick method of deleting
       the IPC facilities, being easier to use than ipcs and ipcrm, in the event that the
       scheduler has crashed or been killed without deleting the IPC facilities.

       To use this facility, just run gspl-ripc thus:

               gspl-ripc -d >/dev/null

       The diagnostic output may be useful as it reports any inconsistencies.

       The monitoring option can be used to diagnose processes, possibly not GNUspool ones, which
       are interfering with GNUspool shared memory segments, in cases where a third-party
       application is suspected of damaging the shared memory.

       Gspl-ripc also checks for errors in memory-mapped files where the version of GNUspool is
       using those rather than shared memory.

OPTIONS

       -A  Display details of jobs and printers. This often generates a lot of output and is not
           really necessary.

       -D secs
           Monitor which process has last attached to shared memory segments and report changes,
           polling every secs seconds.

       -d  Delete the IPC facilities after printing out contents. This saves messing with
           arguments to ipcrm(1).

       -f  Display the free chains for jobs and printers in shared memory. This generates a lot
           of output and isn't usually necessary.

       -n  Suppress display from -D option if everything is OK.

       -o outfile
           Output to outfile rather than standard output. Set it to /dev/null if you don't want
           to see any output. The output is passed through fgrep(1) to find the line (if any)
           with the process id of the process which last attached to the shared memory.

       -G  Used in conjunction with the -P option, the output from ps(1) is displayed in full,
           without passing it through fgrep(1).

       -P psarg
           Specify argument to ps(1) to invoke if corruption detected when monitoring with -D
           option.

       -r  Read and display the entries on the message queue. This is normally suppressed because
           messages on the queue can't be "peeked at" or "unread".

       -S dir
           This is only relevant for versions of GNUspool which use memory-mapped files rather
           than shared memory. It specifies the location of the spool directory. If this is not
           specified, then the master configuration file gnuspool.conf is consulted to find the
           spool directory location, or failing that, the directory /var/spool/gnuspool is used.

       -x  Dump the contents of shared memory or memory-mapped files in hexadecimal and ASCII
           characters.

       -B n
           Where n may be 1 to 8, specify the width of the hexadecimal dump output as a number of
           32-bit words.

       -N <char>
           Replace the character in the ASCII part of the hexadecimal dump to represent non-ASCII
           characters with the specified character (the first character of the argument). The
           default is ".".

           To specify a space, you may need to use quotes thus:

                   -N ' '

EXAMPLE

       To delete all IPC facilities after GNUspool has crashed.

               gspl-ripc -d -o /dev/null

       To monitor the job shared memory segment for errors, printing out the ps(1) output (where
       the full listing is obtained with "-ef") search for the process id of the last process to
       attach to the segment. Print out the contents of the segment including in hexadecimal
       after corruption is detected.

               gspl-ripc -D 30 -P -ef -o joblog -A -x

SEE ALSO

       gspl-start(1), spshed(8).

COPYRIGHT

       Copyright (c) 2009 Free Software Foundation, Inc.  This is free software. You may
       redistribute copies of it under the terms of the GNU General Public License
       <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>.  There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by
       law.

AUTHOR

       John M Collins, Xi Software Ltd.