You can get help and usage information for any Styx Grid Service from the
SGSRun program. Just typing SGSRun on its own
will reveal a usage message that shows that SGSRun expects at
least three arguments: the host name and port number of the remote server
and the name of the Styx Grid Service itself.
If you want to see the usage information (i.e. the expected command-line arguments)
for a particular SGS, use the --sgs-help command-line switch.
For example, to get usage information for the reverse2 SGS that
we created earlier in the tutorial, enter:
SGSRun localhost 9092 reverse2 --sgs-help
This will print out (to standard output) the description of the SGS (taken directly from the server's configuration file) and a brief usage message describing the command-line arguments. The above example will print out the following information:
Reads lines of input and outputs them with characters reversed
Usage: reverse2 -i <inputfile> -o <outputfile> [--sgs-help] [--sgs-verbose-help]
[--sgs-debug] [--sgs-allrefs] [--sgs-lifetime <sgs-lifetime>]
Mandatory arguments are given in angle brackets (< >) and optional
arguments are given in square brackets ([ ]).
Note that, in addition to the the arguments that are expected by the reverse2
program, there are a number of optional arguments whose names begin with
--sgs-. There arguments are available for all Styx Grid Services.
More details on the usage of a particular SGS can be found with the
--sgs-verbose-help switch. For example, running
SGSRun locahost 9092 reverse2 --sgs-verbose-help will print out
the following to the console window:
Reads lines of input and outputs them with characters reversed
Usage: reverse2 -i <inputfile> -o <outputfile> [--sgs-help] [--sgs-verbose-help]
[--sgs-debug] [--sgs-allrefs] [--sgs-lifetime <sgs-lifetime>]
-i <inputfile>
Name of input file
-o <outputfile>
Name of output file
[--sgs-help]
Set this switch to print out a short help message
[--sgs-verbose-help]
Set this switch to print out a long help message
[--sgs-debug]
Set this switch in order to enable printing of debug messages
[--sgs-allrefs]
Set this switch in order to get URLs to all output files rather than
actual files
[--sgs-lifetime <sgs-lifetime>]
The lifetime of the SGS in minutes (default: 60)
As you can see, this gives a brief description of all the possible input
parameters (these descriptions are taken from the server's configuration file).
The meanings of the --sgs- parameters will be described later in
this tutorial.
If a Styx Grid Service is not behaving as you think it should, try running
it with the --sgs-debug switch. This will print out some
debugging information that might lead you to the source of the problem. Even
if you can't fix it yourself, this will be useful information that you can
use to ask for help from the mailing lists.
In general, these mailing lists are the best place to go for help as your mail
will reach many users and developers of the SGS software.