HP-UX System Administrator's Guide: Configuration Management

applications. In addition to providing release-to-release compatibility, it is also easier
to parse than human-readable output.
CAUTION: HP reserves the right to change the other output formats of these
commands at any time. HP will not support applications and scripts that parse the
output of these commands unless they use the -P option.
The -P option of each of these commands takes a list of field names, identifying the
fields that the application wants to have appear in the output. The available field names
are different for each command and are documented in the manpages for the commands.
The list is comma-separated and cannot contain spaces. Examples are shown in the
sections “Managing Kernel Modules with kcmodule” (page 160), “Managing Kernel
Tunable Parameters with kctune” (page 170), and “Managing Saved Configurations
with kconfig” (page 189).
The special field name ALL can be used to retrieve all available data. When this field
name is used, the output may include fields that are not listed in the manpage. The
order of fields in the output is undefined.
The output format consists of one line per field, containing the field name, a single tab
character (ASCII 9), the field value, and a newline (ASCII 12). The fields are printed in
the order requested for each item, with empty lines between the items.
Some fields have multiple values. In these cases, there will be one line for each value
of the field, each starting with the field name in the manner described.
Some fields do not have values under some circumstances. For example, the min or
max tunable fields have no meaning for tunables that have no defined limits. In these
cases, no line will be printed for that field.
Recovering from Errors
Occasionally, kernel configuration changes are made that are undesirable. Also,
hardware failures and changes can ruin a previously acceptable kernel configuration.
HP-UX has several mechanisms available to system administrators who need to recover
from such issues, including:
• The kernel configuration log file. See “The Kernel Configuration Log File”
(page 195).
• Saved configurations, including the automatically maintained backup configuration.
See “The Automatic Backup Configuration” (page 198) and “Booting a Saved
Configuration” (page 198).
• Fail-safe boot mode with fail-safe tunable values and module loading. See “Booting
in Fail-Safe Mode” (page 199).
• Boot-time overrides of kernel tunable values.
Recovering from Errors 197