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File Managers / File Handling Utilities

Welcome to the Skunkware File Managers section. These tools allow users to navigate filesystems and manipulate files more easily than with the standard UNIX commands. Mostly, these tools make UNIX a little more accessible for the novice user. Most expert users will probably be comfortable enough with the UNIX commands to not require these tools, but if you are running a system which has novice users, these tools will help them considerably.

Some of the other tools found in this section provide replacement versions of some standard UNIX commands, but contain extra features. For example, both the GNU tar and CPIO programs are found here, and they both offer considerable advantages over the standard versions. As an example, GNU tar can decompress and extract a compressed tar archive with a single command, so you do not need to decompress the file first, or set up command line pipes. The GNU diff replacement has a very useful addition called sdiff, which provides for side-by-side file diffing.

Package List

Cdrecord - create audio & data CD's

Cdrecord is used to record data or audio Compact Discs on an Orange Book CD-Recorder.

Some SCO specific notes are available via http://www.sco.com/skunkware/cdrecord/SCO-NOTES.html.

uw7/fileutil/cdrecord/

osr5/fileutil/cdrecord/

ftp://ftp.fokus.gmd.de/pub/unix/cdrecord/

http://www.fokus.gmd.de/research/cc/glone/employees/joerg.schilling/private/cdrecord.html

GNU cpio

This is the GNU version of the cpio command. It provides support for many different cpio file formats, and can even extract tar archives.

http://www.sco.com/skunkware/osr5/fileutil/cpio/

http://www.sco.com/skunkware/uw7/fileutil/cpio/

ftp://prep.ai.mit.edu/pub/gnu/

GNU diff utilities

The GNU replacements for the diff,diff3 and cmp utilities offer several advantages over their standard counterparts. GNU diff can produce output in normal diff format, context diff, unified diff and even as input to ed. GNU diff also adds a very useful tools called sdiff, which allows you do do side-by-side differencing of files. This makes it very easy to compare two versions of a file.

http://www.sco.com/skunkware/uw2/Packages/diffutils.pkg

http://www.sco.com/skunkware/osr5/fileutil/diffutils/

ftp://prep.ai.mit.edu/pub/gnu/

GNU file utilities

The GNU file utilities package provides replacement versions of the following commands: chgrp, chmod, chown, cp, dd, df, dir, dircolors, du, install, l, ln, ls, mkdir, mkfifo, mknod, mv, rm, rmdir, sync, and touch. Most of these replacement versions offer more flexible options than their standard equivalents.

http://www.sco.com/skunkware/uw7/fileutil/

http://www.sco.com/skunkware/osr5/fileutil/fileutils/

ftp://prep.ai.mit.edu/pub/gnu/

GNU find utilities

These are the GNU find utilities. Aside from a replacement version of the find command, this package also provides a replacement for xargs, and adds a very useful new command called locate. Locate will query a database of files and instantly allow you to locate a file on your system, rather than recursively searching through a number of file systems. Locate relies on the fact that the database is updated (via cron) on a regular enough basis to be useful. It is possible for locate to report the existence of files which have moved or been removed, if those files were removed between updates to the file database. These are very useful commands.

osr5/fileutil/findutils/

uw2/fileutil/findutils/

ftp://prep.ai.mit.edu/pub/gnu/

The GNU Interactive Toolkit

The GNU interactive toolkit provides a set of tools for visually manipulating files and processes on your system. These tools make it much easier for a novice to navigate through the file-system and process lists, and to manage files. The Midnight Commander offers better tools for file manipulation, but GIT provides tools for more than just moving files.

http://www.sco.com/skunkware/osr5/fileutil/git/

ftp://prep.ai.mit.edu/pub/gnu/

Glimpse Index System

Glimpse is a very powerful indexing and query system that allows you to search through all your files very quickly. It can be used by individuals for their personal file systems as well as by organizations for large data collections. Glimpse is the default search engine in Harvest. Glimpse is now at version 4.1.

The Glimpse package contains several programs, the most important of which are glimpse, glimpseindex, agrep, and glimpseserver. To index all files in the a directory tree rooted at DIR, you simply say

        glimpseindex DIR 

(E.g., glimpseindex ~ indexes all your files.) Afterwards, glimpse can search through all these files much the same way as agrep (or any other grep), except that you don't have to specify file names and the search is fast. For example,

         glimpse -1 unbelievable 

will find all occurrences (in all your files!) of "unbelievable" allowing one spelling error;

         glimpse -F mail arizona 

will find all occurrences of "arizona" in all files with "mail" somewhere in their name;

         glimpse  'Arizona desert;windsurfing' 

will find all lines that contain both "Arizona desert" and "windsurfing".

         glimpse  -W 'Arizona;~football' 

will find all lines containing "Arizona" in files that do not contain the word "football".

Glimpse supports three types of indexes: a tiny one (2-3% of the size of all files), a small one (7-9%), and a medium one (20-30%). The larger the index the faster the search. For most applications, the small index (glimpseindex -o) is the best choice. Glimpse supports most of agrep's options (agrep is our powerful version of grep, and it is part of glimpse) including approximate matching (e.g., finding misspelled words), Boolean queries, and even some limited forms of regular expressions.

WebGlimpse adds search capabilities to your WWW site automatically and easily. It attaches a small search box to the bottom of every HTML page, and allows the search to cover the neighborhood of that page or the whole site. With WebGlimpse there is no need to construct separate search pages, and no need to interrupt the users from their browsings. All pages remain unchanged except for the extra search capabilities. It is even possible for the search to efficiently cover remote pages linked from your pages. (WebGlimpse will collect such remote pages to your disk and index them.) Installation, customization (e.g., deciding which pages to collect and which ones to index), and maintenance are easy.

http://www.sco.com/skunkware/uw7/fileutil/glimpse/

http://www.sco.com/skunkware/osr5/fileutil/glimpse/

ftp://ftp.cs.arizona.edu/glimpse/

http://glimpse.cs.arizona.edu/

GNU Midnight Commander

The Midnight Commander is a Norton Commander(tm) clone for UNIX. It allows users to visually manipulate files and directories, and contains many fine features which even more advanced users may appreciate. For example, Midnight Commander allows you to "enter" tar files or compressed tar files, and view their contents as if the file has already been extracted. A very useful and easy to use tool.

http://www.sco.com/skunkware/osr5/fileutil/mc/

http://www.sco.com/skunkware/uw7/fileutil/mc/

ftp://prep.ai.mit.edu/pub/gnu/

calculate a message-digest checksum for a file

md5 takes as input a message of arbitrary length and produces as output a 128-bit "fingerprint" or "message digest" of the input. It is conjectured that it is computationally infeasible to produce two messages having the same message digest, or to produce any message having a given prespecified target message digest. The MD5 algorithm is intended for digital signature applications, where a large file must be "compressed" in a secure manner before being encrypted with a private (secret) key under a public-key cryptosystem such as RSA.

http://www.sco.com/skunkware/uw7/fileutil/md5/

http://www.sco.com/skunkware/osr5/fileutil/md5/

ftp://ftp.cert.org:/pub/tools/

mkisofs - make an ISO9660 filesystem

This package provides a set of tools which can be used to create an ISO9660 filesystem, which is then suitable for burning to a CD-ROM. Used in conjunction with the OSR5 utility burncd, you can use this software for mastering a CD-ROM. These two tools were, in fact, used to prepare test cuts of the Skunkware CD-ROM itself.

http://www.sco.com/skunkware/osr5/fileutil/makecd/

ftp://tsx-11.mit.edu/pub/linux/packages/mkisofs/

MS-DOS Tools

This set of tools allows you to easily access and copy files from MS-DOS based hard drive partitions and diskettes. The tools will recognize the new 32 bit FAT filenames, and are very easy to use. They provide a great alternative to the standard DOS tools.

http://www.sco.com/skunkware/uw7/fileutil/

http://www.sco.com/skunkware/osr5/fileutil/mtools/

ftp://prep.ai.mit.edu/pub/gnu/

GNU tar

The GNU tar replacement is a very useful replacement for the standard tar command. If for nothing else, the fact that you can create and manipulate compressed archives makes this a very worthwhile replacement for your standard tar. GNU tar can compress archives with either the GNU zip or the standard compress utility, and can view archives compressed with both compression tools. No system is complete without GNU tar.

http://www.sco.com/skunkware/osr5/fileutil/tar/

http://www.sco.com/skunkware/uw2/fileutil/tar/

ftp://prep.ai.mit.edu/pub/gnu/

Last Updated: Tuesday May 11, 1999 at 11:34:29 PDT

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