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Altair FlowTracer User Guide
FlowTracer is a complete system to create, manage, and execute design flows.
Find, Remove and Clean Files
Find Files and Jobs

Welcome
What's New
View new features for FlowTracer 2025.1.0.
FlowTracer Overview
An advanced mission critical dependency management platform for developing and executing flows.
FlowTracer Tutorials
Discover FlowTracer functionality with interactive tutorials.
Altair FlowTracer User Guide
FlowTracer is a complete system to create, manage, and execute design flows.
- FlowTracer Roles
  When using FlowTracer in large deployments, three main roles emerge: Administrator, Developer and User. In smaller organizations, a given person may have multiple roles, but the duties of each role still exist.
- Introduction to VOV
  FlowTracer is derived from the system "VOV" originally developed at UC-Berkeley. The word "VOV" is not an acronym, but can be thought of as a contraction of the word "evolve".
- Concepts and Terminology
- Run, Rerun, Stop and Kill Jobs
  The act of requesting FlowTracer to bring a particular target up-to-date is sometimes called a Retrace Request or more simply a Retrace.
- Find, Remove and Clean Files
  - Show a List of Jobs
    The tool vovshow is used to show things like jobs, retrace requests, the project itself.
  - Find Files and Jobs
  - Query the vovserver
    The vovselect command provides a way to retrieve specific data from the vovserver, with filtering done on the server side. This method is differs from some of the VTK calls, which get all data and require processing on the client side to get the data of interest.
  - Invalidate Dependent Nodes
    The utility vovtouch toggles the status of the given nodes twice, so that each node passes through a state of being INVALID. The end state of each node depends on what state it started in.
  - Clean Directories
    The tool vovcleandir is used to delete unused files.
  - Remove Nodes From the Graph
    Forgetting nodes means eliminating them from the flow.
  - Remove Files
    To remove a file from the file system which is currently registered in a flow graph, you should notify FlowTracer that the file is going away. The simple way to do this is to use the vovblast command.
  - Remove Large Files That Are Easy to Recreate
    The tool vovremove offers advanced management of file system disk space
- Graphical User Interface
- Browser Interface
  This chapter will cover how you can use your web browser to manage FlowTracer.
- Command Line Interface
  The Altair Accelerator products have a rich set of programs that can be run on the shell command line.
- Create Sets with Selection Rules
- Advanced Information
- Troubleshooting
- Create a FlowTracer Project
- Resource Management
  Altair Accelerator includes a subsystem for managing computing resources. This allows the design team to factor in various constraints regarding hardware and software resources, as well as site policy constraints.
- Rename Nodes
  Renaming of nodes is a task for more advanced users. In most cases, it is simpler to forget all nodes and rebuild the trace from scratch.
- Miscellaneous
- Reports
Altair FlowTracer Administrator Guide
This manual is aimed at the person who will be the administrator for FlowTracer. This person will be responsible for configuring the network resources, setting up the licensing, and establishing security and access rules for the system.
Altair FlowTracer Developer Guide

View All Altair Accelerator Help

Find Files and Jobs

Find Files

The tool vovfind searches the flow for the files that match the regular expressions provided as arguments.

Each argument is interpreted as a regular expression RX and is used to construct Selection Rules of the form:

isfile name~RX

For example:

% vovfind stdout
00005962 VALID    ${TOP}/Design/.stdout_musa10142542
00006227 VALID    ${TOP}/Design/.stdout_wolfe7515419
00006289 VALID    ${TOP}/Design/.stdout_wolfe5609764
% vovfind c$ h$
00006229 VALID    ${TOP}/Design/main.c
00006289 VALID    ${TOP}/tech/scmos/maniac
00006213 VALID    ${TOP}/Design/local.h

Find Jobs

There is no simple command to find jobs in the flow. Instead, use the more general search mechanism available by means of the command vovset.

You can create a temporary set that will hold all the jobs that match a certain criteria, and then display the set with the desired output format. For example:

% vovset create "tmp:test" "isjob age<3600"
vovset: message: Created Set Id=00004444 Name=tmp:test Rule=isjob age<3600
% vovset show tmp:test
00012394 INVALID  vw cdwrite -e -v iso9660/ftnc5.1             
00012634 INVALID  vov ./printlabel ftnc.ps ../iso9660/ftnc5.1  
00017410 INVALID  vrt cdrecord -eject -v speed=2 dev=0,2,0 i...
00392367 INVALID  vov ./build.tcl index.tcl > build_index.log  
00392387 INVALID  vov ./makeindex.tcl                          
00392424 INVALID  clevercopy work/index.html ../../doc/html/...
% vovset show -O '@LEVEL@ @ID@' tmp:test
32 00012394
32 00012634
36 00017410
8 00392367
4 00392387
6 00392424

If you know in which directory a job is supposed to run, you can change to that directory and use vst -a to see all the jobs in there.

% vst -a
2 014426579 VALID      BASE     vovbuild -T -l topLevelTasks -f TaskFlow.tcl