[nycbug-talk] my sysctl quest

George Rosamond george at ceetonetechnology.com
Tue Mar 13 22:26:05 EDT 2012


On 03/13/12 22:21, Isaac Levy wrote:
> Some messy and informative sysctl docs (circa 2005),
>
> On Mar 13, 2012, at 9:08 PM, Isaac Levy wrote:
>
>> # grep -niR SYSCTL
>
> Reading source is extremely fun and rewarding,
>
> On a FreeBSD box, (not in a jail [unless you compile a kernel in there for some reason]),
>
> # cd /usr/src/tools/tools/sysdoc/
> # sudo make
> # sudo make install
>
> And, boom- now there are more sysctl man pages:
> # man 5 sysctl
>
> --
> Looks like Tom Rhodes started this ball rolling quite some time ago, with lazy/easy to edit configs in groff/mdoc format which can get parsed by these utilities and dropped into a working system as a man page, (man 'tunables').
>
> Still pondering what to do next, because:
>
> - There's simply not enough sysctls documented at this point in time
>    (Can get busy here…)
> - The doc strings are merely a different and seemingly more verbose version of the sysctl string, which I found sysctl itself will output:
> FreeBSD# sysctl -aod
>
> So…  Sorry to be noisy with this one, I'm excited to find this, regardless of it's
>

Keep making noise.

There might be a nice fun direction to take with this quest.

And I assume what you say about the lack of documentation applies to all 
the BSDs.

g




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