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Name

vbrowser - visual browser for SUIF

Synopsis

vbrowser [ options ] { infile }*

Description

The vbrowser program gives a powerful graphical user interface to view SUIF files. The input can be any single SUIF file, or any set of files that together form a fileset (see linksuif and the SUIF library reference manual for more information). If no input file is given on the command line, the files to be opened will have to be selected through the ``Open File Set...'' option under ``File'' on the menu bar of the main window.

The interface is largely self-explanatory. At start-up, a base window is opened from which other views of the SUIF file or files may be opened. Just start it up on a nontrivial SUIF file and start experimenting. It can do even more if the source files and s2c output (.out.c) files are in the same directory as the SUIF files. In that case, you can have source file, SUIF, and output C windows open and clicking in one will highlight the corresponding code in the other windows. Clicking on ``Help'' from the menu bar of the main window will show a help screen with some more information.

The vbrowser needs to find the tcl files for visual_tcl_lib to run. It looks in the directory $VISUAL_TCL for these files. If $VISUAL_TCL is not set, it uses $SUIFHOME/tcl instead. Since an ordinary installation puts the visual_tcl_lib files into $SUIFHOME/tcl, $VISUAL_TCL shouldn't normally need to be set by the user.

In addition, at start-up time, vbrowser looks for a configuration file that is used mainly to set fonts and colors (a standard X windows resource file). It looks for (in order): ``$HOME/.visual.rc'', ``$VISUAL_CONFIG/visual.rc'',

``/usr/local/lib/visual.rc'',
and ``$SUIFHOME/$MACHINE/visual.rc''. As soon as it finds one, it stops looking for any others. Note that this allows the user to set $VISUAL_CONFIG to point to the directory containing the visual.rc file of choice. If $VISUAL_CONFIG is not set, $VISUAL_CONFIG/visual.rc will be omitted from the serach list. If none of these is found, a warning is printed, but vbrowser will still operate normally. A sample visual.rc is included with the visual_tcl_lib sub-package, but it is not installed anywhere by default.

Note that if you click the right mouse button in the call graph viewer window, you will get a menu that includes the ``Layout'' option. The second choice under the ``Layout'' option is ``Dot''. That option uses the external program dot to layout the graph -- data is exported to a file, dot is run on that file, and then the result is read back in from a file and used to layout the graph on the screen. The dot program is not a part of a SUIF distribution. It is part of the Bell Labs graphviz package. In order to successfully use this option, you must install graphviz on your system and make sure the dot command is in your path. The graphviz package is available directly from Bell Labs at ``http://www.research.att.com/orgs/ssr/book/reuse''.

Options

-help Show a help message.

-sync
Use synchronous mode for display server.

History

This program was written by Jing Yee Lim.


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