Chapter 4. Running Flood

Flood is a command line software. You can run it from Unix shell, MS-DOS prompt or simmilar facility of your operating system. Flood accepts only one argument, and that is a path to configuration file. Example:

$ flood /home/jacekp/tests/simple-test.xml
        

If no argument is given, then flood uses standard input stream (stdin), so you can use flood in pipe processing:

$ get_urls.py /usr/local/apache/logs/access.log | flood
        

Flood outputs results to standard output stream (stdout) and errors (if any) to standard error stream (stderr). You can save result to file, or pipe it to flood processing script, like this:

$ flood /home/jacekp/tests/simple-test.xml > /home/jacekp/tests/simple-test.out
$ flood /home/jacekp/tests/simple-test.xml | analize-relative
        

If flood is used in shell scripts, then you can test $? variable for flood return code. If the code is 0, then flood has performed a successful test. Other value (usually greater than 0) means, that there was error during test.

There's ongoing development of GUI application for flood. When usable, such application will make working with flood much easier.