Orca is a tool useful for plotting arbitrary data from text files onto a directory on a Web server.

Orca generates a large of number of plots from different types of data sets.

Here are some key features of "Orca":

· Configuration file based.
· Reads white space separated data files.
· Watches data files for updates and sleeps between reads.
· Finds new files at specified times.
· Remembers the last modification times for files so they do not have to be reread continuously.
· Can plot the same type of data from different files into different or the same PNGs.
· Different plots can be created based on the filename.
· Parses the date from the text files.
· Create arbitrary plots of data from different columns.
· Ignore columns or use the same column in many plots.
· Add or remove columns from plots without having to deleting RRDs.
· Plot the results of arbitrary Perl expressions, including mathematical ones, using one or more columns.
· Group multiple columns into a single plot using regular expressions on the column titles.
· Creates an HTML tree of HTML files and PNG plots.
· Creates an index of URL links listing all available targets.
· Creates an index of URL links listing all different plot types.
· No separate CGI set up required.
· Can be run under cron or it can sleep itself waiting for file updates based on when the file was last updated.



Orca has only four command line options. They are:

-gifs: Generate GIFs instead of PNGs. Tell Orca to generate GIFs instead of PNGs. You may not want to generate GIFs since PNGs are 1/3 the size of GIFs and take less time to generate.

-o: Once. This tells Orca to go through the steps of finding files, updating the RRDs, updating the PNGs, and creating the HTML files once. Normally, Orca loops continuously looking for new and updated files.

-r: RRD only. Have Orca only update its RRD files. Do not generate any HTML or PNG files. This is useful if you are loading in a large amount of data in several invocations of Orca and do not want to create the HTML and PNG files in each run since it is time consuming.

-v: Verbose. Have Orca spit out more verbose messages. As you add more -v's to the command line, more messages are sent out. Any more than three -v's are not used by Orca.

After the command line options are listed, Orca takes one more argument which is the name of the configuration file to use. Sample configuration files can be found in the sample_configs directory with the distribution of this tool.