TotalView provides both an easy-to-learn graphical user interface (GUI) and a Command Line Interface (CLI). The CLI and GUI are well integrated, so you can use them both together, launching the CLI from the GUI and invoking CLI commands that display data in the GUI. Or you can use either separately without the other. However, because of the GUI’s powerful data visualization capabilities and ease of use, we recommend using it (along with the CLI if you wish) for most tasks.

The GUI is an easy and quick way to access most of TotalView’s features, allowing you to dive on almost any object for more information. You can dive on variables, functions, breakpoints, or processes. Data is graphically displayed so you can easily analyze problems in array data, memory data, your call tree/graph, or a message queue graph.

The Command Line Interface, or CLI, provides an extensive set of commands to enter into a command window. These commands are embedded in a version of the Tcl command interpreter. You can enter any Tcl statements from any version of Tcl into a CLI window, and you can also make use of TotalView-specific debugging commands. These additional commands are native to this version of Tcl, so you can also use Tcl to manipulate your programs. The result is that you can use the CLI to create your own commands or perform any kind of repetitive operation. For example, the following code shows how to set a breakpoint at line 1038 using the CLI: