As a long term Unix admin, it’s frustrating when there are commands on my systems for which there aren’t man pages. As a long-term NetWorker user, it’s equally frustrating when there aren’t man pages for particular NetWorker commands.
When I’ve discussed this in the past, I’ve usually had a response of “that’s because you shouldn’t be running that command”. That’s a bad response. The correct response should be something along the lines of “oops, we’ll write a man page for the next release that states:
That command is for internal NetWorker use only. It does X. It should not be run manually.”
Having undocumented commands that give no output, hang or produce strange results is just inviting frustration. Of just the nsr prefixed commands, on my current 7.6 lab server, the following commands are undocumented:
- nsravamar
- nsravtar
- nsrbmr
- nsrcatconfig
- nsr_cp_install
- nsrdmpix
- nsrdsa_recover
- nsrdsa_save
- nsrfile
- nsrfsra
- nsrlmc
- nsrndmp_2fh
- nsrrcopy
- nsrrcopy2
- nsrvcbserv_tool
So out of the 55 nsr prefixed commands I have on my server, 15 (or 27%) are undocumented.
Note to EMC: This does not produce a healthy level of trust. Please – get some documentation on these commands, even if that documentation gives us a one line overview of where they’re used and tells us not to run them ourselves.
NetWorker Blog 