Setting Preferences, Options, and X Resources
In most cases, preferences are the best way to set many features and characteristics. In some cases, you need have more control. When these situations occur, you can the preferences and other TotalView attributes using variables and command-line options.
Older versions of TotalView did not have a preference system. Instead, you needed to set values in your .Xdefaults file or using a command-line option. For example, setting totalview*autoLoadBreakpoints to true automatically loads an executable’s breakpoint file when it loads an executable. Because you can also set this option as a preference and set it using the CLI dset command, this X resource has been deprecated.
NOTE: Deprecated means that while the feature still exists in the current release, there’s no guarantee that it will continue to work at a later time. We have deprecated all “totalview” X default options. TotalView still fully supports Visualizer resources. Information on these Visualizer settings is in the document TotalView
XResources.pdf, downloadable from the TotalView website at
https://help.totalview.io/.
Similarly, documentation for earlier releases told you how to use a command-line option to tell TotalView to automatically load breakpoints, and there were two different command-line options to perform this action. While these methods still work, they are also deprecated.
In some cases, you might set a state for one session or you might override one of your preferences. (A
preference indicates a behavior that you want to occur in all of your TotalView sessions.) This is the function of the command-line options described in “
TotalView Command Syntax” in the
Classic TotalView Reference Guide.
For example, you can use the -bg command-line option to set the background color for debugger windows in the session just being invoked. TotalView does not remember changes to its default behavior that you make using command-line options. You have to set them again when you start a new session.
