pmcpp (1)

pmcpp [-D name[=value] ...] [infile]

pmcpp provides a very simple pre-processor for manipulating Performance Metric Name Space (PMNS) files for the Performance Co-Pilot (PCP). It is most commonly used internally to process the PMNS file(s) after pmLoadNameSpace(3) or pmLoadASCIINameSpace(3) is called.

Input lines are read from infile (or standard input if infile is not specified), processed and written to standard output.

All C-style comments of the form /* ... */ are stripped from the input stream.

There are no predefined macros for pmcpp although macros may be defined on the command line using the -D option, where name and value must follow the same rules as described below for the #define directive.

pmcpp accepts the following directives in the input stream (like cpp(1)):

• #include "filename"

  or

  #include <filename>

  In either case the directory search path for filename tries filename first, then the directory for the command line infile (if any), followed by the $PCP_VAR_DIR/pmns directory. #include directives may be nested, up to a maximum depth of 5.

• #define name value

  Defines a value for the macro name which must be a valid C-style name, so leading alphabetic or ``_'' followed by zero or more alphanumerics or ``_''. value is optional (and defaults to an empty value) but when present it may not contain white space and quoting or escaping is not supported.

• #undef name

  Removes the macro definition, if any, for name.

• #ifdef name

  ...

  #endif

  or

  #ifndef name

  ...

  #endif

  The enclosing lines will be stripped or included, depending if the macro name is defined or not.

Macro substitution is achieved by breaking the input stream into words separated by white space or one of the characters ``.'' or ``:'' - this matches the syntax of the PMNS, see pmns(5). Each word is checked and if it matches a macro name, the word is replaced by the macro value, otherwise the word is unchanged.

There is generally one output line for each input line, although the line may be empty if the text has been stripped due to the handling of comments or conditional directives. When there is a change in the input stream, an additional output line is generated of the form:

# line "name"

to indicate the following line of output corresponds to line number line of the input file name.

Important cpp(1) features that are not supported by pmcpp include:

• #if expr

  ...

  #endif

• Nested use of #ifdef or #ifndef.

• #else within an #ifdef or #ifndef.

• Stripping C++ style comments, as in // comment

• Error recovery - the first error encountered by pmcpp will be fatal.

• cpp(1) command line options like -U , -P and -I.

Environment variables with the prefix PCP_ are used to parameterize the file and directory names used by PCP. On each installation, the file /etc/pcp.conf contains the local values for these variables. The $PCP_CONF variable may be used to specify an alternative configuration file, as described in pcp.conf(5).

cpp(1), pmLoadASCIINameSpace(3), pmLoadNameSpace(3), pmns(5), pcp.conf(5) and pcp.env(5).