9 Additional Features

VAMPIR accesses several external tools to perform some of its tasks. These tools must be located in a directory included in your PATH environment variable:

• lpr or lp, the standard UNIX printing facilities, to print lists and window snapshots.
• import, a screen snapshot utility from the ImageMagick package to export or print window contents. ImageMagick is delivered as part of VAMPIR; it can also be downloaded from ftp.zam.kfa-juelich.de, directory pub/graphics/ImageMagick.
• If you have trace files compressed with gzip or compress, VAMPIR can extract them automatically if their counterparts gunzip or uncompress, respectively, are available.

There are quite a few other enhanced features that cannot be described in detail in this paper; the most important ones are mentioned below:

• filter functions: VAMPIR allows to simultaneously display up to 512 nodes. Typically, this number is much too large to be handled meaningfully; therefore, powerful filter functions are available to reduce the number of nodes, either automatically or manually by the user.
• movie support: after each animation step, control is optionally given back to a user-command (i.e., a shell script). This allows to generate movies unattended by the user, just by specifying a single command in a sub-panel.