ARCHIE INFO: telnet to one of the machines below and login as archie. Then type help. Or if you just need a particular program, use command prog, e.g., prog xmol and you will get a list of archives which carry a file which contains xmol in its name. If you are on a UNIX system, you may want to save the results as they appear on your screen. Use script command which will place all your screen input/outpupt in a file "typescritp". *--------------------------------------------------------------------* | Servers: | | archie.unl.edu 129.93.1.14 | | archie.sura.net 128.167.254.179 | | archie.rutgers.edu 128.6.18.15 | | forum.ans.net 147.225.1.10 | | archie.cs.huji.ac.il 132.65.6.15 | | archie.wide.ad.jp 133.4.3.6 | | archie.au 139.130.4.6 | | archie.funet.fi 128.214.6.100 | | archie.ncu.edu.tw 140.115.19.24 | | archie.doc.ic.ac.uk 146.169.11.3 | | archie.sogang.ac.kr 163.239.1.11 | | | | o Questions/comments to archie-admin@ans.net, site add/delete | | requests to archie-updates@bunyip.com | | | | Client software is available on ftp.ans.net:/pub/archie/clients; | | documentation in /pub/archie/doc. | *--------------------------------------------------------------------* Help gives you information about various topics, including all the commands that are available and how to use them. Telling archie about your terminal type and size (via the "term" variable) and to use the pager (via the "pager" variable) is not necessary to use help, but provides a somewhat nicer interface. Currently, the available help topics are: about - a blurb about archie bugs - known bugs and undesirable features bye - same as "quit" email - how to contact the archie email interface exit - same as "quit" help - this message list - list the sites in the archie database mail - mail output to a user nopager - *** use 'unset pager' instead pager - *** use 'set pager' instead prog - search the database for a file quit - exit archie set - set a variable show - display the value of a variable site - list the files at an archive site term - *** use 'set term ...' instead unset - unset a variable whatis - search for keyword in the software description database For information on one of these topics type: help ---------- help search --------- The 'search' variable determines the kind of search performed on the database by the 'prog' command, providing flexibilty on search times and ranges. 'search' is a string variable whose value is one of the following: (1) "sub" Substring (case insensitive). A simple, everyday substring search. A match occurs if the the file (or directory) name in the database contains the user-given substring. Example: "is" will match "islington" and "this" and "poison" (2) "subcase" Substring (case sensitive). As above but the case of the strings involved becomes significant. Example: "TeX" will match "LaTeX" but not "Latex" or "TExTroff". (3) "exact" This is the DEFAULT search method. Exact match. The fastest search method of all. The restriction is that the user string (the argument to the 'prog' command) has to _exactly_ match (including case) the string in the database. This is provided for those of who who know just what you are looking for. For example, if you wanted to know where all the "xlock.tar.Z" files were, this is the kind of search to use. (4) "regex" ed(1) regular expressions. Searches the database with the user (search) string which is given in the form of an ed(1) regular expression. NOTE: Unless specifically anchored to the beginning (with ^) or end (with $) of a line, ed(1) regular expressions have ".*" prepended and appended to them. For example, it is NOT NECESSARY to say prog .*xnlock.* since prog xnlock will suffice. Thus the regex match becomes a simple substring match. An "ed(1) regular expression" (from here on called RE) is the particular type of regular expression used in the "ed" editor under Unix. For those who are interested in all the gory details of REs see the help for "regex" (which is incomplete, at the moment :-(), otherwise what follows should be sufficient for most needs. A regular expression is a convenient way to search for a set of specific strings matching a pattern. To be able to specify such a pattern with only the ordinary set of printable character we have to co-opt some of them. For example in a RE the period means _any_ single character, while an asterisk, '*', means zero or more occurences of the *PRECEDING* RE. For example: knob - matches any string containing the substring 'knob' a*splat - matches strings that contain zero or more a's followed by the string 'splat' #.*# - would match anything containing a '#' followed by zero or more occurences of _any_ character, followed by another '#' Other special characters that may be useful are '[' and ']', which are used together. They can be used to specify either a set of characters to match or a set of characters to not match. An example of the first case is: [abcd] which matches any of one of the four letters, while an example of the second case is: [^abcd] in which the '^' _in_the_first_position_ means that any character _not_ in the list will be matched. As well, ranges can be specified with a '-'. [a-z] matches any lower case letter and, [^a-z] matches any character other than a lower case letter. Furthermore, you can specify multiple ranges such as: [%@a-z0-9] or [^A-Za-z] meaning: match '%' or '@' or any lower case letter or digit, and match any character other than a letter, respectively. When you want to match a character which has a special meaning you should precede it by a backslash, '\'. Some final examples of REs are: [Mm]ac\.txt - match anything containg the string "Mac.txt" or "mac.txt" [^aeiou][^aeiou]* - match any string consisting entirely of non-vowels foo-v[0-9]\.tar\.Z - match "foo-v0.tar.Z" through "foo-v9.tar.Z" Good luck, and remember that many things can be found with only a simple substring (e.g. latex).