[Crash-utility] crashdc : automatic data collection for new vmcores in text format

[Dave Anderson]

----- "Louis Bouchard" <louis.bouchard at hp.com> wrote:

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> Hello everyone.
> 
> In a previous life, I was doing Tru64 support and we had a crashdc
> script that would collect result of a small set of data out of the crash
> dump to a text file every time a new dump would get created. The
> advantage of this is to allow a customer to send the basic dump
> information in a text format to support engineers for a first pass.
> Dumps are getting big these days and it can take days to get the whole
> vmcore file.
> 
> So I took the idea and recreated the mechanism on linux based on crash.
> It's a small shell script that build a crash command file and feeds it
> to the crash utility automatically. It can also be invoked manually on
> existing dumps rather easily. Here is its format :
> 
> $ ./crashdc -h
> usage: crashdc [-d level] [-h] [-V] [-x /path/to/crash/exe]
> /path/to/namelist /path/to/vmcore /path/to/output/directory
> 
> I'm relying on existing kdump mechanism to automate the collection of
> data whenever a new vmcore is generated.  Right now, I have it working
> on RHEL5, close to be working on SLES11 and not working on SLES10.  But
> this is not why I'm telling you all this.
> 
> I am coming to you to know if there would be some interest in including
> those scripts into the crash-utility rpm.  I'm ready to package it
> myself and to give those scripts their own home, but since the
> unavoidable dependency is to have crash present, I was thinking that it
> might be better to have it included with crash.
> 
> Right now, here is what is included :
> 
>  - /usr/bin/crashdc
>  - /usr/bin/run-crashdc-rhel.sh
>  - /usr/bin/run-crashdc-sles.sh
>  - /usr/bin/run-crashdc-sles11.sh
>  - /usr/share/man/man8/crashdc.8
> 
> I would like to have your opinion and comments on this suggestion, and
> on the value of having such a script available for general use.

Is /usr/bin/crashdc itself a shell script?

Dave