What happened to ktrace and kdump

Antonio Rocco wrote:
Hi

Although the manual pages are there none of the commands work. Are there any alternatives? I'm also mourning the loss of apropos. Again the manual is there but not much else.

Anyone noticed anything else missing?

I'd be interested in your thoughts.

Tony

apropos works for me: (needs sudo or su)
apropos foobar
foobar: nothing appropriate

but ktrace and kdump do not.
I also notice that the command 'where' is missing although it's in the man pages.

Message was edited by: nerowolfe

ktrace has been replaced with dtrace. These are some related utilities and Apple-created scripts that use it as well. Try "man -k dtrace" to get a list.

Tony

It would help if you filled in your profile, so we could see which OS version you have. But if man -k and apropos are not working, you have a problem.

On my 10.5.5 machine:

macbook:~ michaelc$ apropos trace | wc
 65 628 5170
macbook:~ michaelc$ man -k trace | wc
 65 628 5170

You may want to re-instal. Alternatively, Pacifist can help you extract what you are missing, but if you're not sure, the re-instal might be safer.

Aaargh! Left it too long to edit. Anyway, just an addition:

EDIT Maybe you aren't missing any programs, but your whatis database is not up to date. Check that you have these files:

-r-xr-xr-x 1 root wheel 1007 29 Sep 2007 /etc/periodic/weekly/320.whatis
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root wheel 620 29 Sep 2007 /etc/periodic/weekly/999.local

and then check the periodic scripts, particulary weekly, are being run in a timely manner:

macbook:~ michaelc$ ls -l /var/log/*.out
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 534234 18 Oct 13:55 /var/log/daily.out
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 1092 1 Oct 10:44 /var/log/monthly.out
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 22918 18 Oct 13:55 /var/log/weekly.out

Michael Conniff wrote:
Aaargh! Left it too long to edit. Anyway, just an addition:

EDIT Maybe you aren't missing any programs, but your whatis database is not up to date. Check that you have these files:

-r-xr-xr-x 1 root wheel 1007 29 Sep 2007 /etc/periodic/weekly/320.whatis
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root wheel 620 29 Sep 2007 /etc/periodic/weekly/999.local

I have these files

and then check the periodic scripts, particulary weekly, are being run in a timely manner:

macbook:~ michaelc$ ls -l /var/log/*.out
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 534234 18 Oct 13:55 /var/log/daily.out
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 1092 1 Oct 10:44 /var/log/monthly.out
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 22918 18 Oct 13:55 /var/log/weekly.out

I don't have any of these three logs. Aren't they deleted after the cleanup runs or am I missing something?

Message was edited by: nerowolfe

There's a PATH problem with makewhatis on my machine.

From weekly.out:
Rebuilding whatis database:
makewhatis: /usr/share/man//usr/share/man:/usr/local/share/man:/usr/X11/man: No such file or directory
makewhatis: /usr/local/share/man//usr/share/man:/usr/local/share/man:/usr/X11/man: No such file or directory
makewhatis: /usr/X11/man//usr/share/man:/usr/local/share/man:/usr/X11/man: No such file or directory

I haven't had the time to sort it out.

Mark Jalbert wrote:
There's a PATH problem with makewhatis on my machine.

I get the same error messages, and back in May/Jun tried to discover what was wrong. In fact it is a bug in the makewhatis executable: all the scripts appear to do the right thing???

In fact makewhatis is called twice by the weekly task, but only the second call gives the errors:

Rebuilding whatis database:
exec makewhatis /Users/michaelc/man /usr/share/man
exec makewhatis -a -L /Users/michaelc/man /usr/share/man
makewhatis: /Users/michaelc/man//Users/michaelc/man:/usr/share/man: No such file or directory
makewhatis: /usr/share/man//Users/michaelc/man:/usr/share/man: No such file or directory

(The two "exec" lines are from echo commands I put in.)

The point is the first makewhatis appears to work, in that I have the correct "whatis" files in my man folders, and both whatis and apropos work OK.

nerowolfe wrote:
I don't have any of these three logs. Aren't they deleted after the cleanup runs or am I missing something?

No, they are cumulative logs and only shrink if you do something about it. Try

sudo periodic daily weekly monthly

and then check again. Be patient: the weekly task can take a little while.

Michael Conniff wrote:

nerowolfe wrote:
I don't have any of these three logs. Aren't they deleted after the cleanup runs or am I missing something?

No, they are cumulative logs and only shrink if you do something about it. Try

sudo periodic daily weekly monthly

and then check again. Be patient: the weekly task can take a little while.

I just ran the daily manually and did get a daily.out
Does this mean that these scripts are not running automatically? And if so, how to fix?

I seem to be opening another can of worms here.
man periodic says that the process is run by crontab
Looking into crontab I get this:
The periodic and atrun jobs have moved to launchd jobs
# See /System/Library/LaunchDaemons

So the calling process has been moved?
What should I be looking for in the LaunchDaemons directory?
I do see a com.apple.periodic-daily.plist and similar ones for weekly, monthly there.

I wonder how common this is? I migrated from Tiger (default install) and now I wonder if this happened back then?

Message was edited by: nerowolfe

Apparently I am not alone regarding maintenance scripts:
http://lowendmac.com/misc/08mr/mb0910.html

OK, I don't believe everything in your linked topic. Notice the timestamps on my "*.out" files i my post above: 13:55 (yesterday) was when I woke my MacBook from sleep, and that then caused launchd to "catch up" on the tasks that should have run at 3:15 in the morning. As far as I'm concerned, the periodic tasks run when they should under Leopard.

You should have the following files in /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/:

macbook:/System/Library/LaunchDaemons michaelc$ ls -l periodic
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 579 29 Sep 2007 com.apple.periodic-daily.plist
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 623 29 Sep 2007 com.apple.periodic-monthly.plist
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 625 29 Sep 2007 com.apple.periodic-weekly.plist

Other files that are involved in the periodic task:

/usr/sbin/periodic # a shell script: take a look
/etc/defaults/periodic.conf

as well as the scripts in "/etc/periodic". It's also worth reading the man page. You might also want to take a look at Getting Started with launchd.

I'm not sure how a Tiger migration would affect this: I originally did an "Upgrade" but later backed up and did an "Erase & Install" to get rid of the annoying ownership problems.

Did you look at your .plist files? They're a bit long to post all of them, but in the weekly, for example, you should see:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.
com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
 <key>Label</key>
 <string>com.apple.periodic-weekly</string>
 <key>ProgramArguments</key>
 <array>
 <string>/usr/sbin/periodic</string>
 <string>weekly</string>
 </array>
 <key>LowPriorityIO</key>
 <true/>
 <key>Nice</key>
 <integer>1</integer>
 <key>StartCalendarInterval</key>
 <dict>
 <key>Hour</key>
 <integer>3</integer>
 <key>Minute</key>
 <integer>15</integer>
 <key>Weekday</key>
 <integer>6</integer>
 </dict>
</dict>
</plist>

I do have the three maintenance .plist files in the LaunchDaemons directory. That part is good.

I am wondering if installing Onyx did it? Prevented them from running on their own?
The reason I say this is that on my other MBP I do have the three aforementioned logs and no Onyx.
It seems to be running quite will in that respect.

A quick bit of history:
This MBP was created from the other one using Transfer Assistant when I first fired this one up.
At that point, they were identical, filewise. Any current differences between the two are from software apps installed on one and not the other.

I made the same default install of Leopard on both - so it's not related to Tiger at all.

I had no ownership problems or any other obvious issues so I am still running that initial Leopard install over Tiger on both boxes.

I did have Onyx on this box - I just uninstalled it. If that was the problem I will soon see.
I also installed the Maintiget widget so I can quickly look at the files.

I'll view the .plist as you noted and see what's there.

I can check the files on both MBPs and compare them very easily (ain't screen sharing great? 🙂 ).

Thanks for taking the time - it's a great learning experience for me.

nerowolfe wrote:
I am wondering if installing Onyx did it? Prevented them from running on their own?

That's an interesting idea, although I can't see why offhand. Keep us posted 😉