COLLECTL2PCP(1)

💅 COLLECTL2PCP — the manual page, but make it cute

okay bestie, gather round, because this one is genuinely iconic: collectl2pcp is the little command that takes your raw collectl(1) data and turns it into a shiny PCP archive. it's giving "glow-up for your logs" ✨

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🌸 NAME 🌸

collectl2pcp — import collectl data to a PCP archive

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🦋 SYNOPSIS 🦋

collectl2pcp [-fv?]  [-D debug] file [file ...]  archive

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💖 DESCRIPTION 💖

so here's the tea, bestie 🫖 — collectl2pcp reads raw collectl(1) data out of each file and creates a brand new PCP archive with the basename archive. that's it, that's the whole job, and it does it flawlessly 💅

each input file can be gzipped, no drama — just needs the .gz suffix. 💅

the PCP archive and at least one input file are required arguments. not optional. no skipping. periodt. 👑

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✨ OPTIONS ✨

these are the command line options, and yes, we're going through all of them:

• -f, --force — overwrites the archive (plus the index and meta files, the whole lil entourage 🎀) if it already exists. lowkey a little dangerous, but it's your archive, main character.
• -v, --verbose — reports progress and errors in full detail, very "tell me everything" energy. it also reports a count of unsupported metric data in the collectl(1) input file(s) — stuff that's normally silently skipped. so if you're nosy (valid 💖), this is the flag for you.
• -?, --help — displays the usage message and exits. the classic "wait what do I do" button 🙈
• file [file ...] — these are your collectl(1) input files. and here's the important bit, so listen up 🫶: if you give more than one, they must contain data for the same host, and they must be given in time-stamp chronological order on the command line. no shuffling, bestie, the order matters.

💡 side note that's actually in the manual: when collectl(1) runs as a service, it normally creates files with date-based names that sort chronologically all on their own (like, /var/log/collectl/*.gz will sort correctly 💅). so the universe already handled it for you. slay.

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🌈 PCP ENVIRONMENT 🌈

environment variables with the prefix PCP_ are what parameterize the file and directory names that PCP uses. on every installation, the file /etc/pcp.conf holds the local values for these variables. and the $PCP_CONF variable can be used to point at a different configuration file instead, exactly as described in pcp.conf(5). 🧚

for environment variables that affect PCP tools in general, go look at pmGetOptions(3). iykyk 💜

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💀 DEBUGGING OPTIONS 💀

the -D or --debug option turns on extra diagnostics on stderr to help triage problems. real talk though — the info is sometimes cryptic 😭 and it's primarily intended to provide guidance for developers rather than for end-users. so it's not really a "fun facts about your archive" situation.

debug is a comma-separated list of debugging options. to get the list of available debugging options and what they mean, use pmdbg(1) with the -l option. 🎀

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👑 SEE ALSO 👑

collectl(1), PCPIntro(1), LOGIMPORT(3), pcp.conf(5), pcp.env(5) and PMNS(5). go read them, bestie, they're all in the group chat 💖

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and that's the whole page!! brought to you by Performance Co-Pilot and PCP — this one's the collectl2pcp(1) manual, mwah, no notes, bye bestie 🫶✨💅