.TH lcm-spy 1 2009-07-28 "LCM" "Lightweight Communications and Marshalling (LCM)"
.SH NAME
lcm-spy - traffic inspection tool
.SH SYNOPSIS
.TP 5
\fBlcm-spy \fI[options]\fR

.SH DESCRIPTION
.PP
\fBlcm-spy\fR is the Lightweight Communications and Marshalling traffic 
inspection utility.  It is a graphical tool for viewing messages received on 
an LCM network, and is analagous to tools like Ethereal/Wireshark and tcpdump
in that it is able to inspect all LCM messages received and provide information
and statistics on the channels used.

When given appropriate LCM type definitions, \fBlcm-spy\fR is able to
automatically detect and decode messages, and can display the individual fields
of recognized messages.  \fBlcm-spy\fR is limited to displaying statistics for
unrecognized messages.

\fBlcm-spy\fR collects the following statistics for each channel:
.IP - 2
Channel name
.IP - 2
Number of messages received
.IP - 2
Message Rate (Hz)
.IP - 2
Bandwidth (KB/s)

On its own, this information can often be used to verify that messages are
being transmitted on the expected channels, and at the expected data rates.

.SH OPTIONS
The following options are provided by \fBlcm-spy\fR
.TP
.B \-l, \-\-lcm\-url=\fIURL\fR
Use the specified LCM URL
.TP
.B \-h, \-\-help
Shows some help text and exits

.SH AUTOMATIC MESSAGE DECODING

If a Java class generated by \fBlcm-gen\fR for an LCM type definition
is contained within a JAR file that is on the Java classpath,
\fBlcm-spy\fR automatically detects the class and uses Java reflection
to insert the corresponding LCM type definitions into a type database.
Subsequently, \fBlcm-spy\fR is able to automatically recognize and
decode messages received that correspond to all such types. 

.SH SEE ALSO
.BR lcm-gen (1)

.SH COPYRIGHT

lcm-spy is part of the Lightweight Communications and Marshalling (LCM) project.
Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify it under the terms of
the GNU Lesser General Public License as published by the Free Software
Foundation; either version 2.1 of the License, or (at your option) any later
version.  See the file COPYING in the LCM distribution for more details
regarding distribution.

LCM is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU
Lesser General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU Lesser General Public
License along with LCM; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51
Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA

.SH AUTHOR

This manual page was written by Albert Huang.