HELP POPARCHIVE Steve Knight, Oct 1991
Updated by Aaron Sloman, 11 Jul 1999
29 Jun 2009
MUCH OF THE FILE BELOW IS NOW OUT OF DATE. IT IS RETAINED FOR HISTORICAL
INTEREST. FOR UP TO DATE INFORMATION SEE
http://www.poplog.org
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/poplog/freepoplog.html
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/poplog/poplog.info.html
The PLUG Source Code Archive
============================
-- How to get at the archive
-- If You've Never Used Anonymous FTP Before
-- What to do with Compressed Tar Archives
-- Important
One of the services that the Pop User Group provides is a public source
code library. Until recently, the archive was only available on magnetic
tape or by mail-server. However, we can now provide an anonymous ftp
version. (This distribution mechanism is much easier to maintain and
more reliable in use than the other methods.)
-- How to get at the archive ------------------------------------------
Try
http://www.poplog.org
(The Plug Archive was previously maintained at HP Labs. This is no
longer the case.)
-- If You've Never Used Anonymous FTP Before --------------------------
(The instructions in this section are no longer needed if you obtain the
archive file from www.poplog.org.)
To get at the archive you have to have access to a program called ftp.
This program is not the most user-friendly beast. However, you don't
have to know much about it to get at the PLUG archive. If you do learn
about it then you will access to ftp archives all over the world.
Ftp allows you to access files on remote machines -- possibly thousands
of miles away. To start ftp, you should give it the address of the
computer you want to access. In this case, you should start ftp as
follows
% ftp hplose.hpl.hp.com
Several things can happen at this point. Possibly you don't have ftp
access, in which case the program won't exist. Too bad. Another
possibility is that ftp cannot grok the address "hplose.hpl.hp.com". In
this case, try it again with the raw numbers
% ftp 15.255.59.1
and you *might* get lucky. Finally, you might actually make contact with
a remote computer.
This computer, which lurks a mere 50m from my desk, will now ask for
your name and password. Give "anonymous" as the name and your address as
the password (anything will do for the password). This special name
gives you access to a public area of 'hplose'.
You should now be told that you are successfully talking to "hplose" and
a not very informative prompt waits for your next command. At this point
you can issue a few UNIX-like commands. In particular, you can navigate
to the pub directory by typing
> cd pub
and have look around with
> ls
Now, it is very important to switch the ftp program into binary mode. If
you don't do this, your copy of the archive will be corrupted. (Oops.)
> binary
This instructs ftp that you are going to start shipping text with funny
characters. (Why ftp doesn't work in this mode by default is a mystery
to me.) You should now grab the archive.
> get plug.tar.Z
This will take a little while. The archive is not large in its
compressed form but ftp is often slow. If you want to see something
during this process you could issue the
> hash
command BEFORE the get command. This will generate a hash character
everytime another 1K is dragged across. The archive is approximately 1Mb
in size.
This dialog will terminate, I hope, with a message reporting success.
Now exit from ftp by typing ^D or quit. What you should see in your
current directory is the file
plug.tar.gz
This is a compressed tar-archive.
-- What to do with Compressed Tar Archives ----------------------------
If you are on a UNIX machine, you should now type
% gunzip plug.tar.gz
% tar xvf plug.tar
The first command uncompresses plug.tar.gz and turns it into plug.tar.
This is a tar-archive. So you run tar to eXtract, Verbosely, File
plug.tar. The v option generates some text telling you about what's
going on.
This should leave you with the file plug.tar and a directory hierarchy
./plug/...
If this is the case, then you have recovered the source code archive
correctly and can delete the tar archive.
rm plug.tar
-- Important ----------------------------------------------------------
Although members of PLUG have devoted their spare time and effort in
keeping the archive up to date, its software must be used on an as-is
basis. Neither PLUG, individual members of PLUG, or anyone connected
with the archive can provide any guarantee or warranty as to the fitness
of use of the archive software. Of course, we are interested in trying
to keep the software to a good standard, and if you have comments we
would be interested in hearing them, this does not imply any commitment
or service in responding to comments.
Disclaimers like this might seem an irrelevance. Alas we live in a world
where it is often necessary to point out the obvious -- that the archive
is a collection of unvetted contributions -- to avoid later
misunderstandings.
--- C.all/help/poparchive
--- Copyright University of Sussex 1992. All rights reserved. ----------