RECAP(8)

🌸 RECAP 💅

okay bestie, so this is recap(8) from the System Manager's Manual, and it's genuinely one of the most useful little gremlins you'll ever keep in your system. sit down, grab a strawberry, we're doing this 🍓

✨ NAME ✨

recap — dumps periodic information about running applications and resource usage. yes girl, it's a lil snitch that tells you what your box was doing. and honestly? iconic behavior.

🎀 SYNOPSIS 🎀

recap [OPTION]

that's it. one binary, a couple flags, no drama. periodt.

💖 DESCRIPTION 💖

so recap is a user-configurable script that you can run once, OR run periodically out of cron or systemd.timers, and what it does is dump info about running processes and resource usage. literally what it says on the tin 🫶

and like, why do you care? because it is so useful on servers that have periodic, mysterious performance anomalies — you know the vibe, everything's fine, everything's fine, and then at 3:47am the load spikes and nobody knows why. recap is your bestie who was taking notes the whole time so you can track down what may be going on at the time of any particular incident. main character energy tbh 👑

the values for which reports get generated and how many reports are stored can be overridden in /etc/recap.conf. and the output files from the script get written to BASEDIR. no cap, that's the whole system.

now for the flags, bestie, there are three and you're gonna know all of them 💅

• -B, --backup — this performs a "backup". it copies the latest log files from the last execution into the "backups" directory inside BASEDIR. the files get identified by a timestamp in the name. so it's giving "save the receipts" ✨
• -S, --snapshot — this performs a "snapshot" report. it generates a set of output files in the "snapshot" directory inside BASEDIR, outside of the standard rotation. the files are identified by a timestamp in the name. so like a lil bonus pic that doesn't get deleted in the rotation 🎀
• -V, --version — print version and exit. short, sweet, to the point. ate.

📁 FILES 📁

here's where everything lives, bestie, memorize or don't, but here they are:

• /etc/recap.conf
• /etc/cron.d/recap
• /usr/lib/systemd/system/recap.{service,timer} — Unit files for running recap periodically.
• /usr/lib/systemd/system/recap-onboot.{service,timer} — Unit files for running recap on boot.

🐛 REPORTING BUGS 🐛

found a bug? 😭 bugs and issues get submitted via github at <https://github.com/rackerlabs/recap/issues>. don't suffer in silence, tell the maintainers, they're nice fr fr.

👑 AUTHOR 👑

The recap scripts are maintained by Rackspace, and the list of contributors is available at <https://github.com/rackerlabs/recap/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md#contributors>. shoutout to everyone who touched this thing 💜

🔍 SEE ALSO 🔍

go read these too, iykyk:

• recap.conf(5)
• recaplog(8)
• crontab(5)
• systemd.timer(5)

and that's the whole page, bestie!! 🌈 this one's from the System Manager's Manual, dated Aug 18, 2017 — so yes it's been out here being iconic since 2017 and it still slays. go dump some reports, go find your anomalies, go be the sysadmin the server deserves 🫶✨💖