Chapter 23. Utilities Reference

Table of Contents

Command Line Tools
The wacsblogctl command
The wacsvidcomb command
The wacscachectl command

Command Line Tools

These tools provide access to some of the newer features in WACS, notably the blogging feature and the content caching features. At present they have no web-based equivalents although this will probably change in a future version of WACS.

The wacsblogctl command

Since WACS 0.9.0, there has been a very simplistic blogging system built into WACS. The main use of it so far has been for the updatestats tool to post an article detailing the latest updates but highlighted in a model-centric rather than set-centric way. This behaviour is optional and is configured through the standard wacs configuration file. It is also possible to use the blogging system for other content of a more editorial nature.

It is this more editorial material and getting it into the WACS blogging system that the wacsblogctl application is primarily concerned with. You are expected to prepare the material within a normal HTML editor of your choice and then save the resulting article. It is this file that wacsblogctl processes and turns into a new blog article. The wacsblogctl supports modes of --load, --dump, --purge and --help.

When you are composing a blog entry, the first line of your simplistic HTML page will become the title up to the first paragraph break mark, ie <p>. All the subsequent text will be the body of the blog entry. You can use all normal HTML directives including tables, font settings, etc and you can include links to wacs apps and icons. You can either give the full URL with any <img src= or <a href= tags you wish to add e.g. http://myserver.example.com/cgi-bin/wacs/wacsimg/mini343.jpg or you can specify it with the standard wacs configuration and menu file notation of #WACSIMG#/mini343.jpg.

For more information on how to use this, please see the section called “The wacsblogctl Command”.

The wacsvidcomb command

wacsvidcomd which is discussed in some detail in the the section called “Content Caching Mechanisms” section of the chapter on Chapter 13, When Using Wacs For Hosting provides a database driven simplistic video editor/encoder that creates edited compilation videos from segmented video clips appropriately marked up within the Wacs database.

The wacscachectl command

The wacscachectl takes a mode and set number as an argument and prepares cached content for that set within the WACS content caching mechanism introduced in WACS 0.9.1. At present only --create is accepted as a mode, and a set number as the argument. For video files, the cooked compilation file if needed is expected to have already been created using wacsvidcomb. Please see the section on content caching in Chapter 13, When Using Wacs For Hosting for more information