Miscellaneous software tools

Last update: Wed Jan 28 21:42:59 MST 2004

Table of contents

• Introduction
• Distribution file formats
• Package directory
• Package descriptions

Introduction

This directory contains miscellaneous useful software tools, many of them developed at the Center for Scientific Computing at the University of Utah Mathematics Department (known as The College of Science Computer from 1978 to 1986).

NOTICE: Effective Mon Dec 23 09:25:47 2002, all packages listed here have a separate Web/FTP site, such that files .../pub/misc/package-* are also stored in .../pub/package/ (as UNIX links, to ensure identical contents). This change was made because this directory has gotten rather cluttered. Newer releases might be found in the package-specific directories, but the old versions listed here will be retained indefinitely because they are referenced in online and published documentation.

Most of these tools can be built on any UNIX or POSIX-conformant system, and some include IBM PC DOS or Windows executables. Many of the newer ones are built using GNU autoconfigure, allowing a build, validation check, and installation with a single command:

./configure && make all check install

Distribution file formats

Where standard UNIX manual pages are available in the distributions, they have been extracted and automatically converted to HTML files named package-name.html, so that you can read more about the package to help decide whether it is useful to you.

All software distributions are available in at least these four archive formats:

.jar

Java archive. .jar files can also read by InfoZip's unzip, although the command-line format for jar is like that of UNIX tar.

To unbundle:

jar xf package-name.tar

.tar.bz2

bzip2'ed (bzip2-compressed) UNIX tar archive. bzip2 is available at http://sources.redhat.com/bzip2/.

To unbundle:

tar xfj package-name.tar.bz2

(if you have GNU tar), or else

bunzip2 < package-name.tar.bz2 | tar xf -

.tar.gz

gzipped (GNU gzip -compressed) UNIX tar archive. gzip is available at ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/gzip.

To unbundle:

tar xfz package-name.tar.gz

(if you have GNU tar), or else

gunzip < package-name.tar.gz | tar xf -

.zip

InfoZip archive. zip and unzip are available at http://www.cdrom.com/pub/infozip/.

To unbundle:

mkdir package-name
cd package-name
unzip ../package-name.zip

.zoo

Zoo archive. zoo is an older, and now probably obsolete, archive format developed by Rahul Dhesi; it is available here in this directory. We preserve it so that the contents of .zoo files will not be lost.

To unbundle:

mkdir package-name
cd package-name
unzip ../package-name.zip

A few distributions are also available in these alternative archive formats:

.arc

PKarc archive ( arc, pkarc, and pkunzip can handle this archive format).

To unbundle:

mkdir package-name
cd package-name
arc x ../package-name.zip

.shar

UNIX shell archive bundle.

To unbundle:

mkdir package-name
cd package-name
sh < ../package-name.shar

For browsing convenience, contents listings of these archive file formats are also available: .arc-lst, .jar-lst, .shar-lst, .tar-lst, .zip-lst, and .zoo-lst

Important note:

The .tar.bz2, .tar.gz and .jar archives always unbundle into a subdirectory named package-name. Old archives that did not satisfy this requirement were unbundled and then repackaged and renamed (if needed) on 18-Jan-2000 to guarantee this convention.

Because package-name often contains major and minor version numbers separated by dots, and since filenames with more than one dot are illegal on some non-UNIX file systems, the .arc, .shar, .zip, and .zoo archives unbundle into the current directory. Therefore, you should always ensure that you are working in a suitably-named empty directory before unbundling such archive formats. Otherwise, you may overwrite important existing files!

Package directory

Package descriptions