[nycbug-talk] my sysctl quest

Isaac Levy ike at blackskyresearch.net
Tue Mar 13 22:21:39 EDT 2012


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 

Rocket-
.ike





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