# General SICS commands

This section describes general SICS concepts and SICS commands available to all instruments.

## Chapter Overview

- This chapter starts with an overview of some basic SICS concepts.
- Than there are system commands for closing the server, requesting status information etc.
- The Token commandis for managing control access to the SICS server.
- A few commands change user rights, set output files and the like.
- SICS has a built in macro facility which is accessible through a few commands.
- Then there is the famous LNS-Rünbuffer system.
- The new batch file processing system.
- Motors and parameters need to be driven.
- SICS has a facility to optimise a peak with respect to several parameters.

SICS has various ways (to many!) to log the I/O from and to an instrument control server. This has devolped over time and may need a cleanup.

- There exists a server log where all I/O and internal messages is written to automatically. As this can get quite large the files for this are cyclically reused. This is log aimed at debugging problems with the SICS server.
- Logging of client output to a file can be performed with the LogBook command. This is a wrapper around the config file command. This is obsolete.
- Then there is a commandlog which writes all I/O coming from clients with user or manager privilege. These log files are kept under /home/INSTRUMENT/log for each day. With this log file all important operations on an instrument can be reconstructed. This gets written automatically without user intervention.