The template switch alows you to specify which data sources you are going to update and in which order. If the datasources specified in the template are not available in the rrd file, the update process will abort with an error message.
The remaining elements of the argument are DS updates. The order of this list is the same as the order the datasources were defined in the rra. If there is no data for a certain data-source, the letter U (eg. N:0.1:U:1) can be defined.
The format of the value acquired from the datasource is dependent of the datasource type chosen. Normally it will be numeric, but the data acquisition modules my impose their very own parsing of this parameter as long as the colon (:) remains the datasource value separator.
rrdtool update demo1.rrd N:3.44:3.15:U:23
Update the database file demo1.rrd with 3 known and one *UNKNOWN* value. Use the current time as the update time.
rrdtool update demo2.rrd 887457267:U 887457521:22 88745790:2.7
Update the database file demo2.rrd which expects data from a single data-source, three times. First with an *UNKNOWN* value then with two normal readings. The update interval seems to be around 300 seconds.