# phpman > man > sos(1) [sos(1)](https://www.chedong.com/phpMan.php/man/sos/1/markdown) General Commands Manual [sos(1)](https://www.chedong.com/phpMan.php/man/sos/1/markdown) ## NAME sos - A unified tool for collecting system logs and other debug information ## SYNOPSIS **sos** component [options] ## DESCRIPTION **sos** is a diagnostic data collection utility, used by system administrators, support represen‐ tatives, and the like to assist in troubleshooting issues with a system or group of systems. The most well known function is **sos** **report**. An sos archive is typically requested by support organizations to collect baseline configura‐ tion and system data from which to begin the troubleshooting process. ## COMPONENTS sos supports several subcommands or components. Each provides a different set of information for the user. Supported components are as follows **report** Report generates an archive of system information including configuration files and command output. Information included in the report is based upon plugins that are ac‐ tivated automatically when certain criteria, such as installed packages, files, ser‐ vices, or system architecture is detected. See **sos** **report** **--help** and **man** **sos-report** for more information. May also be invoked via the alias **rep**. ### collect Collect is used to capture reports on multiple systems simultaneously. These systems can either be defined by the user at the command line and/or defined by clustering software that exists either on the local system or on a "primary" system that is able to inform about other nodes in the cluster. When running collect, sos report will be run on the remote nodes, and then the result‐ ing archives will be copied from those nodes to the local system running sos collect. Archives are then removed from the remote systems. See **sos** **collect** **--help** and **man** **sos-collect** for more information. May also be invoked via the alias **sos** **collector** or the deprecated command **sos-collec**‐‐ **tor**. ### clean|cleaner|mask This subcommand takes input of either 1) an sos report tarball, 2) a collection of sos report tarballs such as from **collect**, or 3) the unpackaged directory of an sos report and obfuscates potentially sensitive system information that is not covered by the standard postprocessing of **sos** **report**. Such data includes IP addresses, networks, MAC addresses, and more. Data obfuscated by this command will remain consistent throughout the report and across reports provided in the same invocation. Additionally, care is taken to maintain network topology rela‐ tionships between matched data items. See **sos** **clean** **--help** and **man** **sos-clean** for more information. May be invoked via either **sos** **clean**, **sos** **cleaner**, **sos** **mask**, or via the **--clean**, **--cleaner** or **--mask** options for **report** and **collect**. **help** This subcommand is used to retrieve more detailed information on the various SoS com‐ mands and components than is directly available in either other manpages or --help output. See **sos** **help** **--help** and **man** **sos-help** for more information. **upload** This subcommand uploads an input file to either a distribution-defined or a user-de‐ fined target. The file can be an SOS archive or any other type of file, such as a vm‐ core or log file. See **sos** **upload** **--help** and **man** **sos-upload** for more information. ## GLOBAL OPTIONS sos components provide their own set of options, however the following are available to be set across all components. **--batch** Do not prompt interactively, user will not be prompted for any data ### --encrypt Encrypt the resulting archive, and determine the method by which that encryption is done by either a user prompt or environment variables. When run with **--batch**, using this option will cause sos to look for either the **SOSEN**‐‐ **CRYPTKEY** or **SOSENCRYPTPASS** environment variables. If set, this will implicitly enable the **--encrypt-key** or **--encrypt-pass** options, respectively, to the values set by the environment variable. This enables the use of these options without directly setting those options in a config file or command line string. Note that use of an encryption key has precedence over a passphrase. Otherwise, using this option will cause sos to prompt the user to choose the method of encryption to use. Choices will be [P]assphrase, [K]ey, [E]nv vars, or [N]o encryp‐ tion. If passphrase or key the user will then be prompted for the respective value, env vars will cause sos to source the information in the manner stated above, and choosing no encryption will disable encryption. See the sections on **--encrypt-key** and **--encrypt-pass** below for more information. ### --encrypt-key KEY Encrypts the resulting archive that sos report produces using GPG. KEY must be an ex‐ isting key in the user's keyring as GPG does not allow for keyfiles. KEY can be any value accepted by gpg's 'recipient' option. Note that the user running sos report must match the user owning the keyring from which keys will be obtained. In particular this means that if sudo is used to run sos report, the keyring must also be set up using sudo (or direct shell access to the ac‐ count). Users should be aware that encrypting the final archive will result in sos using dou‐ ble the amount of temporary disk space - the encrypted archive must be written as a separate, rather than replacement, file within the temp directory that sos writes the archive to. However, since the encrypted archive will be the same size as the original archive, there is no additional space consumption once the temporary directory is re‐ moved at the end of execution. This means that only the encrypted archive is present on disk after sos finishes run‐ ning. If encryption fails for any reason, the original unencrypted archive is preserved in‐ stead. ### --encrypt-pass PASS The same as --encrypt-key, but use the provided PASS for symmetric encryption rather than key-pair encryption. ### --config-file CONFIG Specify alternate configuration file. ### -s, --sysroot SYSROOT Specify an alternate root file system path. ### --tmp-dir DIRECTORY Specify alternate temporary directory to copy data during execution. ### --threads THREADS Specify the number of threads sos report will use for concurrency. Defaults to 4. ### -v, --verbose Increase logging verbosity. May be specified multiple times to enable additional de‐ bugging messages. The following table summarizes the effects of different verbosity levels: 1 (-v) : Enable debug messages for sos.log. Show individual plugins starting. 2 (-vv) : Also print debug messages to console. 3 (-vvv) : Enable debug messages for archive file operations. Note this will dra‐ matically increase the amount of logging. ### -q, --quiet Only log fatal errors to stderr. ### -z, --compression-type {auto|xz|gzip} Compression type to use when compression the final archive output **--help** Display usage message. ## SEE ALSO [**sos.conf**(5)](https://www.chedong.com/phpMan.php/man/sos.conf/5/markdown) ## MAINTAINER Maintained on GitHub at ### AUTHORS & CONTRIBUTORS See **AUTHORS** file in the package documentation. April 2020 [sos(1)](https://www.chedong.com/phpMan.php/man/sos/1/markdown)