[gpfsug-discuss] -Y option for many commands, precious few officially!

[Jonathon A Anderson]

I had a bit of a run-in with a gpfs developer at a conference once when I complained about how command output changes frequently, breaking customer scripts. He was confused why we weren’t using `-Y`, and didn’t believe me that it’s simply not documented anywhere!

`-Y` output is essential for interfacing programmatically with GPFS, and I don’t understand why it’s not mentioned in any of the guides or manpages. (Though apparently, according to this thead, it’s since appeared in some newer manpages.)

~jonathon


On 3/28/17, 10:14 AM, "gpfsug-discuss-bounces at spectrumscale.org on behalf of Marc A Kaplan" <gpfsug-discuss-bounces at spectrumscale.org on behalf of makaplan at us.ibm.com> wrote:

    Just looking/scanning the latest (4.2.2) Spectrum Scale Command (and Programming) Reference I only found a few commands that officially are documented as supporting a -Y option:  mmnfs, mmsmb, mmuserauth.
    
    But as many of you have discovered, -Y is accepted and yields "interesting" output for many of the mmXXXX commands.  
    Moreover the output *seems to* have easily discernible patterns that can be parsed by simple programs.
    
    I believe there is no guarantee that the exact command output formats will not change from release to release, so, as a practical matter, if you're going to parse command output, you're probably better off parsing the -Y output,
     even if that is not officially supported.