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Readme for analog3.1

Debugging

This section lists commands to help you debug analog, if you think it's going wrong. There's another section later which lists all the errors and warnings which analog can generate, and what they all mean, and another section which tells you how to report bugs.

First, remember the option we mentioned before, to list the current settings of all of analog's variables. To get this, just put -settings on the command line, or PRINTVARS ON in one of your configuration files, along with your other commands. Then analog will produce the list of settings instead of running in the normal way.

There are commands which control how much debugging information and warning information analog gives out while it is running. By default you get all the warnings and no debugging, but you can change this by means of the commands DEBUG and WARNINGS. If you say

DEBUG ON

you get all the debugging. (And DEBUG OFF turns it off again.) You can also get just certain categories of debugging. The categories are

C: list all corrupt logfile lines
D: information about DNS lookups
F: information about file opening and closing
S: summary information about each logfile when it's closed
U: list unknown domains

So, for example, the command

DEBUG FS

would give you information about file opening and closing, and what was in each logfile, but none of the other sorts of debugging. Each line of debugging information is prepended with its code letter. You can also specify

DEBUG +CD

to add C- and D-category debugging, and

DEBUG -CD

to remove them.

The WARNINGS command acts similarly. As well as WARNINGS ON and WARNINGS OFF, there are warnings in the following categories.

C: invalid configuration specified
D: dubious configuration specified
F: files missing
L: apparent problems in logfiles
M: possibly problems in logfiles
R: turning off empty reports

See the section on errors and warnings for more details about these various categories. Again, warnings are printed with their code letters.

You can also use command line abbreviations for these commands. The DEBUG command is represented by +V (for ON), -V (for OFF), +VFS (to select options FS), +V+FS (to add those options), and +V-FS (to remove them). Similarly the WARNINGS command can be given by +q, -q, +q<options>, +q+<options> or +q-<options>.

There is one more command which is useful when trying to debug analog. If you give the command

PROGRESSFREQ 20000  # say

then analog will produce a little message after every 20,000 lines it reads from the logfile. This is useful to determine whether the program has really stopped or (as is more likely) is just being slow for some reason (such as using DNS lookups).

There is just one more section about analog's configuration commands and command line arguments, but it's a rather long one, on the form interface. (This is a way of running analog by selecting options from a web page.) You might prefer to go straight onto the section on What the results mean.

Stephen Turner
E-mail: sret1@cam.ac.uk

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