How to use this manual

This manual serves as a reference guide for the Splunk user who is looking for a catalog of the search commands with complete syntax, descriptions, and examples for usage.

Quick Reference Information

There are two quick reference guides for the commands:

• The Command quick reference topic contains an alphabetical list of each command, along with a brief description of what the command does and a link to the specific documentation for the command.
• The Commands by category topic organizes the commands by the type of action that the command performs. This topic contains a brief description of what the command does and a link to the specific documentation for the command.

Command topics

Each search command topic contains the following sections: Description, Syntax, Examples, and See also. Many of the command topics also have a Usage section.

Description

Describes what the command is used for. This section might include details about how to use the command. For more complex commands, there might be a separate Usage section.

Syntax

The syntax includes the complete syntax for each search command, and a description for each argument. Some commands have arguments that have a set of options that you can specify. Each of these sets of options follow the argument descriptions.

Required arguments

Displays the syntax and describes the required arguments.

Optional arguments

Displays the syntax and describes the optional arguments. Default values, if applicable, are also listed.

Usage

Contains additional information about using the command.

Examples

This section includes examples of how to use the command.

See also

This section contains links to all related or similar commands.

Command syntax conventions

The command arguments are presented in the syntax in the order in which the arguments are meant to be used.

Arguments are either Required or Optional and are listed alphabetically under their respective subheadings. For each argument, there are Syntax and Description sections. Additionally, there might be other sections, such as Default that provide information about the argument.

See Understanding SPL syntax.

Formatting conventions

Italic

When referring to another manual in the set of Splunk documentation, the name of the manual appears in italic.