gfal2-util

GFAL 2 utils are a group of command line tools for file manipulations with any protocol managed by gfal2

Installation

yum install gfal2-util gfal2-all

Mind that the protocol support of gfal2-util depends on the set of plugins installed in your machine. Installing gfal2-all will trigger an installation of the plugins for file, SRM, GridFTP, HTTP/DAV, LFC, RFIO and DCAP. If you need XROOTD support, you will need to install additionally gfal2-plugin-xrootd.

List of commands

We provide here a brief overview of the command line tools we provide as part of this package. To see detailed usage of each one, you can invoke them with --help to show all the possible options.

Standard commands

gfal-bringonline

Perform a staging operation on the given SURL.

gfal-archivepoll

Perform an archive polling operation on a given SURL.

gfal-cat

Equivalent to cat. Print into the standard output the content of the requested file

gfal-chmod

Equivalent to chmod. Changes the access permissions of the requested file

gfal-copy

Equivalent to cp but more powerful. Copy a file, or set of files, between different storages and/or local. Recursive mode is supported. Try --dry-run to validate what will happen.

gfal-evict

Requests a Tape storage to release the given file's disk replica.

• For SRM storage, this is the equivalent of an unpin operation. The file is marked as eligible for garbage collection
• For CTA storage, this is the equivalent of an evict operation. The file's evict counter is decreased. When the counter reaches zero, the file's disk replica is deleted immediately

gfal-ls

Equivalent to ls. List the content of a directory. Use -l to generate a detailed list.

gfal-mkdir

Equivalent to mkdir. Create a directory

gfal-rename

Equivalent to rename command. Moves the file from one location to another one within the same storage

gfal-rm

Equivalent to rm. Remove a file, or a directory if -r is specified. Try --dry-run if you want to validate what will happen without doing anything.

gfal-save

Reads from stdin and writes into a local or remote file.

gfal-stat

Equivalent to stat. Print information about the file or directory.

gfal-sum

Query or calculate the checksum of the given file. Normally recognised checksums are adler32, md5 and sha1, but it depends on the protocol and/or storage software.

gfal-token

Requests a Storage Endpoint (SE) to issue a token for the given SURL (SE-issued token). The token should be considered opaque, but most often used Grid implementations are JWTs or macaroons. These tokens have great applicability in HTTP-TPC as they avoid the need to perform proxy certificate delegation.

gfal-xattr

Equivalent to attr. Query or set an extended attribute from a file or directory. Which extended attributes are supported depend on the protocol. For instance user.replicas or user.comment can be used for SRM or LFC.

Legacy commands

This commands exists purely to provide ways to access functionality previously provided by lcg-util. We recommend avoiding the usage of these tools if possible.

gfal-legacy-register

Register a new replica in a catalog. We recommend using instead

gfal-xattr [surl] user.replicas=+new_replica

gfal-legacy-replicas

List replicas from a catalog or SRM. We recommend using instead

gfal-xattr [surl] user.replicas

gfal-legacy-unregister

Remove an existing replica from a catalog. We recommend using instead

gfal-xattr [surl] user.replicas=-replica

License

This software is licensed under the Apache 2 License

Copyright (c) 2013-2022 CERN
Copyright (c) 2012-2013 Members of the EMI Collaboration
See http://www.eu-emi.eu/partners for details on the copyright holders.

Contact

You can notify bugs or ask for feature requests via dmc-support@cern.ch or dmc-devel@cern.ch