Provided by: openvswitch-common_2.0.2-0ubuntu0.14.04.3_amd64 
NAME
ovs-appctl - utility for configuring running Open vSwitch daemons
SYNOPSIS
ovs-appctl [--target=target | -t target] command [arg...]
ovs-appctl --help
ovs-appctl --version
DESCRIPTION
Open vSwitch daemons accept certain commands at runtime to control their behavior and
query their settings. Every daemon accepts a common set of commands documented under
COMMON COMMANDS below. Some daemons support additional commands documented in their own
manpages. ovs-vswitchd in particular accepts a number of additional commands documented
in ovs-vswitchd(8).
The ovs-appctl program provides a simple way to invoke these commands. The command to be
sent is specified on ovs-appctl's command line as non-option arguments. ovs-appctl sends
the command and prints the daemon's response on standard output.
In normal use only a single option is accepted:
-t target
--target=target
Tells ovs-appctl which daemon to contact.
If target begins with / it must name a Unix domain socket on which an Open vSwitch
daemon is listening for control channel connections. By default, each daemon
listens on a Unix domain socket named /var/run/openvswitch/program.pid.ctl, where
program is the program's name and pid is its process ID. For example, if
ovs-vswitchd has PID 123, it would listen on
/var/run/openvswitch/ovs-vswitchd.123.ctl.
Otherwise, ovs-appctl looks for a pidfile, that is, a file whose contents are the
process ID of a running process as a decimal number, named
/var/run/openvswitch/target.pid. (The --pidfile option makes an Open vSwitch
daemon create a pidfile.) ovs-appctl reads the pidfile, then looks for a Unix
socket named /var/run/openvswitch/target.pid.ctl, where pid is replaced by the
process ID read from the pidfile, and uses that file as if it had been specified
directly as the target.
The default target is ovs-vswitchd.
COMMON COMMANDS
Every Open vSwitch daemon supports a common set of commands, which are documented in this
section.
GENERAL COMMANDS
These commands display daemon-specific commands and the running version. Note that these
commands are different from the --help and --version options that return information about
the ovs-appctl utility itself.
help Lists the commands supported by the target.
version
Displays the version and compilation date of the target.
LOGGING COMMANDS
Open vSwitch has several log levels. The highest-severity log level is:
off No message is ever logged at this level, so setting a logging facility's log level
to off disables logging to that facility.
The following log levels, in order of descending severity, are available:
emer A major failure forced a process to abort.
err A high-level operation or a subsystem failed. Attention is warranted.
warn A low-level operation failed, but higher-level subsystems may be able to recover.
info Information that may be useful in retrospect when investigating a problem.
dbg Information useful only to someone with intricate knowledge of the system, or that
would commonly cause too-voluminous log output. Log messages at this level are not
logged by default.
Every Open vSwitch daemon supports the following commands for examining and adjusting log
levels.
vlog/list
Lists the known logging modules and their current levels.
vlog/set [spec]
Sets logging levels. Without any spec, sets the log level for every module and
facility to dbg. Otherwise, spec is a list of words separated by spaces or commas
or colons, up to one from each category below:
• A valid module name, as displayed by the vlog/list command on ovs-appctl(8),
limits the log level change to the specified module.
• syslog, console, or file, to limit the log level change to only to the
system log, to the console, or to a file, respectively.
• off, emer, err, warn, info, or dbg, to control the log level. Messages of
the given severity or higher will be logged, and messages of lower severity
will be filtered out. off filters out all messages.
Case is not significant within spec.
Regardless of the log levels set for file, logging to a file will not take place
unless the target application was invoked with the --log-file option.
For compatibility with older versions of OVS, any is accepted as a word but has no
effect.
vlog/set PATTERN:facility:pattern
Sets the log pattern for facility to pattern. Each time a message is logged to
facility, pattern determines the message's formatting. Most characters in pattern
are copied literally to the log, but special escapes beginning with % are expanded
as follows:
%A The name of the application logging the message, e.g. ovs-vswitchd.
%c The name of the module (as shown by ovs-appctl --list) logging the message.
%d The current date and time in ISO 8601 format (YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS).
%d{format}
The current date and time in the specified format, which takes the same
format as the template argument to strftime(3). As an extension, any #
characters in format will be replaced by fractional seconds, e.g. use
%H:%M:%S.### for the time to the nearest millisecond. Sub-second times are
only approximate and currently decimal places after the third will always be
reported as zero.
%D The current UTC date and time in ISO 8601 format (YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS).
%D{format}
The current UTC date and time in the specified format, which takes the same
format as the template argument to strftime(3). Supports the same extension
for sub-second resolution as %d{...}.
%m The message being logged.
%N A serial number for this message within this run of the program, as a
decimal number. The first message a program logs has serial number 1, the
second one has serial number 2, and so on.
%n A new-line.
%p The level at which the message is logged, e.g. DBG.
%P The program's process ID (pid), as a decimal number.
%r The number of milliseconds elapsed from the start of the application to the
time the message was logged.
%t The subprogram name, that is, an identifying name for the process or thread
that emitted the log message, such as monitor for the process used for
--monitor or main for the primary process or thread in a program.
%T The subprogram name enclosed in parentheses, e.g. (monitor), or the empty
string for the primary process or thread in a program.
%% A literal %.
A few options may appear between the % and the format specifier character, in this
order:
- Left justify the escape's expansion within its field width. Right
justification is the default.
0 Pad the field to the field width with 0s. Padding with spaces is the
default.
width A number specifies the minimum field width. If the escape expands to fewer
characters than width then it is padded to fill the field width. (A field
wider than width is not truncated to fit.)
The default pattern for console and file output is %D{%Y-%m-%dT
%H:%M:%SZ}|%05N|%c|%p|%m; for syslog output, %05N|%c|%p|%m.
Daemons written in Python (e.g. ovs-xapi-sync, ovs-monitor-ipsec) do not allow
control over the log pattern.
vlog/reopen
Causes the daemon to close and reopen its log file. (This is useful after rotating
log files, to cause a new log file to be used.)
This has no effect if the target application was not invoked with the --log-file
option.
OPTIONS
-h
--help Prints a brief help message to the console.
-V
--version
Prints version information to the console.
SEE ALSO
ovs-appctl can control all Open vSwitch daemons, including: ovs-vswitchd(8), and
ovsdb-server(8).