Download Automatically Generating Predicates and Solutions for

or network communication, are not handled by our shell
because it does not have the ability to track external components’ output. Also, one can imagine a precondition
command executed before our troubleshooting shell is
launched; our shell will not find that precondition as it
limits dependency tracking to the period in which it is
running.
8 Conclusion
Predicates play an important role for automated configuration management tools such as AutoBash and
Chronus. However, writing predicates by hand is tedious,
time-consuming, and requires expert knowledge. This
work solves the problem of manually writing predicates
by automatically inferring predicates and solutions from
traces of users fixing configuration problems.
Acknowledgments
We thank our shepherd, Yinglian Xie, and the anonymous reviewers
for valuable feedback on this paper, as well as our user study participants. The work has been supported by the National Science Foundation under award CNS-0509093. Jason Flinn is supported by NSF CAREER award CNS-0346686. The views and conclusions contained in
this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as
representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of NSF,
the University of Michigan, or the U.S. government.
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