VERITAS Volume Manager 4.1 Administrator's Guide

Administering Volumes
Monitoring and Controlling Tasks
Chapter 8268
Managing Tasks with vxtask
NOTE New tasks take time to be set up, and so may not be immediately
available for use after a command is invoked. Any script that operates on
tasks may need to poll for the existence of a new task.
You can use the vxtask command to administer operations on VxVM
tasks that are running on the system. Operations include listing tasks,
modifying the state of a task (pausing, resuming, aborting) and
modifying the rate of progress of a task. For detailed information about
how to use vxtask, refer to the vxtask(1M) manual page.
VxVM tasks represent long-term operations in progress on the system.
Every task gives information on the time the operation started, the size
and progress of the operation, and the state and rate of progress of the
operation. The administrator can change the state of a task, giving
coarse-grained control over the progress of the operation. For those
operations that support it, the rate of progress of the task can be
changed, giving more fine-grained control over the task.
vxtask Operations
The vxtask command supports the following operations:
• abortCauses the specified task to cease operation. In most cases, the
operations “back out” as if an I/O error occurred, reversing what has
been done so far to the largest extent possible.
listLists tasks running on the system in one-line summaries. The -l
option prints tasks in long format. The -h option prints tasks
hierarchically, with child tasks following the parent tasks. By default, all
tasks running on the system are printed. If a taskid argument is
supplied, the output is limited to those tasks whose taskid or task tag
match taskid. The remaining arguments are used to filter tasks and limit
the tasks actually listed.
monitorPrints information continuously about a task or group of tasks as
task information changes. This allows you to track the progression of
tasks. Specifying -l causes a long listing to be printed. By default, short
one-line listings are printed. In addition to printing task information
when a task state changes, output is also generated when the task
completes. When this occurs, the state of the task is printed as EXITED.