The Btrieve utility butil is used at a command prompt for manipulation and administration of Btrieve files and their data. You can use butil to perform the following actions:
•Starts and stops continuous operations for use in performing server backups.
•Recovers changes made to a file between the time of the last backup and a system failure.
•Imports and exports ASCII, unformatted, and SDF sequential data.
•Copies data between files.
•Preloads or flushes the file page cache.
•Returns MicroKernel Engine version information.
Continuous operation is a MicroKernel Engine feature that enables you to back up files while they are in use by Zen-based applications. Two maintenance commands, startbu and endbu, begin and end continuous operation on a file or set of files.
Note On Linux or macOS distributions, all slash options use a hyphen instead of a slash. For example, the /O options for butil -copy is -O, as in butil -copy -O. Also, if you specify /PROMPT instead of an owner name, upon execution the command generates an interactive prompt for the owner name.
Options
Maintenance tool command options are not case sensitive unless the option is a file name.
If you run butil without specifying a command option or with an invalid command option, a usage message is printed. The usage message indicates that there is an optional /S command line argument to butil. This argument is ignored on Linux, macOS, or Raspbian.
When copying a file requires an owner name for both the original file and the copied file, the -copy option specifies both owner names, as shown in this example:
Upon execution, the user is first prompted to enter the owner name to access originalFile. Once that file is open, the user is prompted for the owner name to assign to copiedFile.
Butil also offers an option to execute command files.