The Command Line

The Sawmill command line can accept a wide variety of options, including any preference options and a any options which can be put in a profile file. See All Options for a list of all available options.

The "Extra Options" line of the Scheduler accepts all options available from the command line, so this section applies to Extra Options also.

Every option has a location in the configuration hierarchy; e.g. the page header for the profile "MyProfile" is at profiles.myprofile.statistics.miscellaneous.page_header, which means that it's an option in the "miscellaneous" group of the "statistics" group of the "myprofile" profile (myprofile.cfg) in the "profiles" directory of LogAnalysisInfo directory. Once you know the full name of the option, you can use it on the command line; so in this case you could add this to the command line:

  -profiles.myprofile.statistics.miscellaneous.page_header "SOME HEADER"

to override that value of that option for the duration of the command line action. If you have specified a -p option on the command line (as you usually must), you can also shorten the option to this:

  -statistics.miscellaneous.page_header "SOME HEADER"

Most options also have shortcuts, and if you know the shortcut (you can find it out from the option documentation, e.g. Header text in this case, which shows the shortcut for this option is ph), you can use that on the command line, like this:

  -ph "SOME HEADER"

For a complete list of all options and shortcuts, see All Options. In most cases, the shortcut is the first letter of each word in the option name (e.g. ph for page_header), but there are a few exceptions where non-standard shortcuts were required because two options would have had the same shortcut. Some options also have no shortcuts; in that case, the full option name must be used instead.

Command line options can be specified by just typing them after the executable name (on Windows, make sure you use the command line executable, sawmill) on the command line as shown below. To improve ease of reading, a hyphen (-) can be added to the beginning of any profile option.

Below is a sample command line which checks the log data from a profile, and adds any new log data into the existing database for that profile (see Databases).

  sawmill -p myconfig -a ud

The -p option (Profile to use) specifies the profile name; the -a option (Action) specifies the action. Most command lines include a -p and a -a. See Power User Techniques for more command line examples.