If you have a live linux site that is running vmware virtual machines, you can pause the virtual machines when you want to perform a backup, I use acronis for linux which does incremental backups and you can specify a command to run before and after the backup, this allows backups to be performed at scheduled times daily without any intervention. In my examples below, the virtual machine i want to control is in /root/vmware/Recital/Recital.vmx

To pause the virtual machine on linux:

# vmrun pause /root/vmware/Recital/Recital.vmx

and then to unpause after the backup has completed:

# vmrun unpause /root/vmware/Recital/Recital.vmx

That is basicallty it, no need to attend the backup and it can be perfomed at a suitable time so no users are affected.

Incidentally, vmrun lets you startup a virtual machine at system startup too, without needing the GUI:

# vmrun start /root/vmware/Recital/Recital.vmx

Or alternatively stop it:

# vmrun stop /root/vmware/Recital/Recital.vmx

There are lots of other capabilities of this command, running applications inside the virtual machine etc etc. For full details just type vmrun in a terminal window.

Recital on Linux 64 bit requires certain 32 bit libraries for installation and/or operation.  It also needs to be installed and configured as the root user, or using sudo for those systems without a root login.

For systems that do not have the xterm libraries installed, please install these to use xterm, or set the DB_TERM environment variable to start Recital from a terminal:

DB_TERM=gnome-terminal; export DB_TERM

This setting can be added to the /opt/recital/conf/recital.conf (text) file to make it available system-wide.

Please note that the Recital ODBC Driver for Linux requires a 32 bit ODBC Driver Manager.

Centos 6:

sudo yum install zlib-devel.i686 pam-devel.i686

(and accept dependencies)
Then run the installer in text mode

sudo ./recital-10.0.3-linux32.bin --mode text

Run Recital with sudo the first time, to set the system filetype compatiblity settings.

sudo recital

After saving the compatibility settings, quit to exit, then run Recital as your preferred user.

> quit
$ recital

RedHat / Fedora family:

sudo yum install zlib-devel.i686 pam.i686

(and accept dependencies)
Then run the installer in text mode

sudo ./recital-10.0.3-linux32.bin --mode text

Run Recital with sudo the first time, to set the system filetype compatiblity settings.

sudo recital

After saving the compatibility settings, quit to exit, then run Recital as your preferred user.

> quit
$ recital

 Ubuntu family:

sudo apt-get install ia32-libs 

In later versions of Ubuntu, ia32-libs is obsolete. The following package should be installed:

sudo apt-get install lib32z1

Ubuntu 12.04 and above also require the following:

sudo apt-get install libpam0g:i386

Then run the installer in text mode

sudo ./recital-10.0.3-linux32.bin --mode text

Run Recital with sudo the first time, to set the system filetype compatiblity settings.

sudo recital

After saving the compatibility settings, quit to exit, then run Recital as your preferred user.

> quit
$ recital

Recital 10 introduced the ECHO command. This command operates in the same way as the PHP ECHO command. It does not append a newline to the output but rather operates in the same way as the existing ?? command in Recital. The string being output can contain C-style string escapes \n \t or \r (newline, tab and carriage return respectively) e.g.

echo "Hello world\n"

MQCURMSGS()

Syntax

MQCURMSGS( <expN> )

Description

The MQCURMSGS() function returns the current number of unread messages in the queue specified by <expN>

Example

mqdes=mqopen("/myqueue")
if (mqdes < 0)
   messagebox(strerror()+",errno="+alltrim(str(error())))
   return
endif
do while (mqcurmsgs(mqdes) > 0)
   mstr=mqreceive(mqdes)
   if (empty(mstr))
      messagebox(strerror()+",errno="+alltrim(str(error())))
      return
   endif
   messagebox(mstr)
end do
mqclose(mqdes)