Help System for epadmin

Help System Options

The epadmin command complex has extensive documentation and built-in usage help, in three formats:

EP Command Reference

The EP Command Reference has reference pages for:

Man Pages

On appropriate terminals, the epadmin reference pages can be seen as traditional Unix man pages, where the man page for a target is found by adding targetname to epadmin separated by a hyphen. For example, enter commands like the following examples:

man epadmin‑globals
man epadmin‑node
man epadmin‑password
man epadmin‑stream

There is a shorthand version of most man page commands, described in Tips and Tricks.

epadmin Usage Text

On appropriate terminals, use the help keyword to see built-in usage reminder text for epadmin and its targets:

  • Use epadmin help for the usage text starting point.

  • Use epadmin help targets to see a list of available targets.

  • Use epadmin help targetname to see target-specific usage text.

  • Use epadmin --help commandname targetname to see command specific usage text.

You can append ‑‑format=json to the last three commands, which provides the help usage information in industry standard JSON form to make it easy to post-process, if needed. The default is ‑‑format=readable.

Appropriate Terminals

The appropriate terminal to run epadmin commands and epadmin built-in usage text is:

The epadmin man pages are delivered by default for macOS and Linux installations, and thus require a StreamBase-configured shell prompt.

Tips and Tricks

Parsing Usage Text

For Bash shell terminals, you can define a shell function or script like the following to emit a reminder of the command syntax for a given epadmin target:

commands () 
{ 
    epadmin help $1 | /usr/bin/egrep --color=no "^  [a-z]"
}

Note that there are exactly two spaces between the circumflex (^) and open bracket [. The --color=no option may not be needed, depending on your default egrep configuration. Note also that this script returns only the first line for each command syntax usage text; that is adequate for most commands, but misses some parameters for others. This script is useful mostly to remind you of the number and name of the commands for the given target, not each command's full syntax.

For example, when run as:

commands engine

the output is:

  display engine [--name=<String>] [--detailed=<Boolean>] 
  start engine [--name=<String>] 
  stop engine [--name=<String>] 
  suspend engine [--name=<String>] [--debugport=<Integer>]  <==(incomplete syntax)

The following command gathers single-line command usage text for all targets:

for c in `epadmin help targets | cut -c1-19`; do echo =-=-=-=-=-=-=;echo $c; \
echo =-=-=-=-=-=-=;epadmin help $c | /usr/bin/egrep --color=no "^  [a-z]"; done
Shorthand Man Page Commands

The point of typing man command on macOS and Linux has always been to show documentation quickly, right at the shell prompt you're already working from. This goal is hindered by having to type very long commands such as man epadmin-availabilityzone. Accordingly, the TIBCO Streaming installation provides a set of shorthand man page commands for epadmin in addition to the standard ones.

In general, the shorthand version has "epa‑" plus the first syllable or first few unique characters of the full target name. In some cases, an abbreviation in common use is substituted, such as qt for querytable or pw for password.

Standard Man Command Shorthand
man epadmin‑globals man epa‑glob
man epadmin‑adapter man epa‑adap
man epadmin‑application man epa‑app
man epadmin‑artifact man epa‑art
man epadmin‑authentication man epa‑auth
man epadmin‑availabilityzone man epa‑avail
man epadmin‑breakpoint man epa‑break
man epadmin‑cache man epa‑cache
man epadmin‑cluster man epa‑clust
man epadmin‑configuration man epa‑conf
man epadmin‑connection man epa‑conn
man epadmin‑container man epa‑cont
man epadmin‑dynvar man epa‑dyn
man epadmin‑engine man epa‑eng
man epadmin‑globaltransaction man epa‑trans
man epadmin‑history man epa‑hist
man epadmin‑logging man epa‑log
man epadmin‑metric man epa‑met
man epadmin‑node man epa‑node
man epadmin‑object man epa‑obj
man epadmin‑operator man epa‑op
man epadmin‑partition man epa‑part
man epadmin‑password man epa‑pw
man epadmin‑playback man epa‑play
man epadmin‑querytable man epa‑qt
man epadmin‑realm man epa‑realm
man epadmin‑record man epa‑rec
man epadmin‑router man epa‑rout
man epadmin‑secret man epa‑sec
man epadmin‑services man epa‑serv
man epadmin‑snapshot man epa‑snap
man epadmin‑statistics man epa‑stat
man epadmin‑stream man epa‑str
man epadmin‑systemservice man epa‑syst
man epadmin‑trusted man epa‑trust
man epadmin‑tunable man epa‑tun
man epadmin‑user man epa‑user
man epadmin‑version man epa‑ver
man epadmin‑web man epa‑web
Using Man Pages on Cygwin or WSL

Windows 10 does not provide a man command, but you might be running Cygwin or the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) on Windows. In that case, you can configure these systems to view the man pages for epadmin with the following steps:

  1. Copy the entire man subdirectory from a macOS or Linux installation of TIBCO Streaming into the root of your Windows installation.

    By default, no man subdirectory is installed for Windows, so after this copy, you should have something like:

    C:\TIBCO\sb-cep\10.6\man
    
  2. Append or prepend this location to the MANPATH envrionment variable for your login shell for Cygwin or WSL. For example, on Cygwin:

    set MANPATH=/cygdrive/c/TIBCO/sb-cep/10.6/man:$MANPATH
    

    Remember that MANPATH needs to be set to the directory above the man1 and man5 directories that contain the actual files.