Document Contents

Using the CLI assumes that you are familiar with and have experience debugging programs with the TotalView GUI. As CLI commands are embedded within a Tcl interpret, you will get better results if you are familiar with Tcl. However, if you do not know Tcl, you will still be able to use the CLI. What you will loose is the programmability features that Tcl gives. For example, CLI commands operate upon a set of process and threads. You can save this set and apply it to commands based upon what you have saved.

You can obtain information on using Tcl at many book stores, and you can also order these books from online bookstores. Two excellent books are

• Ousterhout, John K. Tcl and the Tk Toolkit. Reading, Mass.: Addison Wesley, 1997.
   
• Welch, Brent B. Practical Programming in Tcl & Tk. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall PTR, 1997.

There is also a rich supply of resources available on the Web. Two starting points are tcl.activestate.com and www.tcltk.com.

The best way to understand the kinds of information in this book is to take a minute or two to browse through this book's table of contents. The fastest way to gain an appreciation of the actions performed by CLI commands is to review Appendix A, which contains an overview of CLI commands.

Here is how the information in this book is organized:

Chapter 1: TotalView Command Line Interface

This first chapter introduces the CLI.

Chapter 2: A Few CLI/Tcl Macros

Because you already know how to program, your biggest challenge in using the CLI will be remembering its commands and understanding how they are used within the Tcl environment. This chapter presents a few macros that demonstrate how the two are used together.

Chapter 3: Groups, Processes, and Threads

Debugging multiprocess, multithreaded programs means that you must understand the way in which processes and threads execute. This chapter introduces this topic and explains the way you tell the CLI which processes and threads it should apply a command to.

Chapter 4: Using the CLI

The CLI commands execute within the Tcl and TotalView environments. (The code used by the CLI and TotalView that interacts with your programs is shared.) This chapter explains the general Tcl environment and how you debug programs using the CLI.

Chapter 5: Type Transformations

There are times when TotalView cannot correctly format your data. For example, TotalView can have difficulty with the C++ STL. You can solve this problem by creating Tcl callbacks that tell the TotalView GUI how it should display information.

Chapter 6: CLI Commands

This chapter contains the man pages for CLI commands.

Appendix A: CLI Command Summary

This appendix contains a listing of all CLI commands, a brief explanation of what the command does, and a depiction of the command's syntax.

Appendix B: CLI Command Default Arena Widths

Here you will find a table containing the default focus for each command. (The focus indicates the processes and threads upon which a command acts.)

Appendix C: Distributed Array Type Mapping

This appendix contains a listing of an example program that creates a Mandlebrot set and type mapping for this program.