Matthew Seaman wrote:
On Sun, Mar 28, 2004 at 05:04:43PM +0900, Rob wrote:
What is this sysctl-black-magic about and where is more information?
You're right that finding which sysctl is required to achieve whatever purpose can be tricky. Finding what sysctls exist is as easy as typing 'sysctl -a', but working out what they actually do -- that's a different story. sysctls are generally documented in man pages which may or may not have a title related to the name of the sysctl. Plus they are usually documented in the *programming* section of the manual, rather than the user or system administration commands sections, whose man pages come up by default if there's more than one page under the same name.
Let's take the vfs.usermount sysctl as an example. That is actually documented in mount(2) -- the page describing the mount() (and umount()) syscall, not mount(8) -- the program for mounting partitions. If you type 'man mount' you'll get the mount(8) man page by default. However if you type 'man 2 mount' you find this timeless wisdom hidden within that page:
By default only the super-user may call the mount() function. This restriction can be removed by setting the sysctl vfs.usermount to a non- zero value.
How do I know where vfs.usermount is documented? Only by the rather unsatisfactory means of grepping the whole collection of man pages:
% cd /usr/share/man % find . -name '*.gz' -print | xargs zgrep -l vfs.usermount
(It would be really nice if the text produced by 'sysctl -d' gave you a reference to the man page(s) where the sysctl was documented.)
There is a project underway to create better documentation for sysctls
Well, at a first glance I found the 'sysctl -ad' to be very incomplete. Although a few entries here do provide an explanation, too many do not and vfs.usermount is among them. Completing this table of explanations would be a good thing to do! Is this related to the project about sysctls docs?
Regards, Rob. _______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"
