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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.
Miscellaneous
Regular Expressions in Selection Rules

Welcome
What's New
View new features for FlowTracer 2025.1.2.
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.
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.
- 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.
- Enable CLI Access on UNIX
  This section explains how to set up a UNIX user's shell environment to have a proper context for the user to run installed Altair Accelerator programs from the command line. The programs that are run from the command line are called the CLI commands.
- Enable CLI Access on Windows
  This section explains how to set up a Window user's command prompt environment to have the proper context for the user to run installed Altair Accelerator programs from the command line. The programs that are run from the command line are called the CLI commands.
- User Interfaces
- Use FlowTracer Help
  FlowTracer documentation is available in HTML and PDF format.
- Projects
- Server Working Directory
  When a project is created, a server working directory (.swd directory) is created to hold configuration and state information about the project.
- Alerts
  VOV issues an "alert" when an event requires attention. An alert can range from information that does not require action to an urgent fault that requires immediate action.
- Manage the Server for a Project
- Security
  The VOV security model consists of assigning a Security Code to each client or client group (VovUser Group) and granting the permission to execute critical tasks only to clients with the appropriate security level.
- Taskers
  A tasker is a VOV client that provides computing resources, specifically CPU cycles, to the vovserver.
- Interfaces to Accelerator, SGE, LSF, and Others
  FlowTracer can be used also as a front end to an existing batch processing system (BPS), for example, Accelerator, LSF, SGE, SGEEE, etc.
- Configuration for Elastic Computing
- Configuration for Altair Accelerator
- Configure a Failover Server Replacement
  If a server crashes suddenly, VOV has the capability to start a replacement server on a pre-selected host. This capability requires that the pre-selected host is configured as a failover server.
- Advanced Information
- Multi-User Altair FlowTracer
  FlowTracer now supports a "multi-user" mode of operation, as a Beta feature. In the multi-user mode, many different users can share the same project, in terms of modifying a flow as well as running different compoments of the flow.
- IT Administrator Topics
- Special Issues
- Miscellaneous
  - NFS Cache
  - Altair FlowTracer and ClearCase
  - Regular Expressions in Selection Rules
  - Time Specifications
    Some VOV procedures and commands accept as input a time specification, which is a string that contains a mixture of digits and the letters s m h d w.
  - Configuration .tcl Files
    Configuration of FlowTracer on a per-project basis is handled by four .tcl files: policy.tcl, security.tcl, resources.tcl, and taskers.tcl.
Altair FlowTracer Developer Guide

Regular Expressions in Selection Rules

The operators ~, !~, ~~ and !~~, which perform string matching, operate with regular expressions (Tcl 8.0). These expressions use the ed syntax. For a complete description of the syntax, invoke one of the following commands:

% man -s n regexp
% man ed

The following is a short summary of the syntax for regular expressions.

The period "." stands for any character.
The asterisk "*" stands for zero or more repetitions of the previous expression.
The plus "+" stands for one or more repetitions of the previous expression.
A backslash \ can be used to escape a literal period, asterisk or plus sign.

Examples

The regular expression ".*" matches every string (any character repeated any number of times).

If you want to make a set of all the files whose name contains .std., specify the regular expression "\.std\..*", in which "\." matches the period.