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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
| Name | Description | Version | OSR5 | UnixWare |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| cdrecord | Record audio & data CD's | 1.8a19 | Yes | Yes |
| cpio | GNU cpio | 2.4.2 | Yes | Yes |
| diff | GNU diff | 2.7 | yes | Yes |
| fileutil | GNU file utilities | 3.15 | Yes | Yes |
| find | GNU find utilities | 4.1 | Yes | Yes |
| git | GNU Interactive Toolkit | 4.3.15 | Yes | Yes |
| glimpse | Glimpse Index System | 4.1 | Yes | Yes |
| mc | The GNU Midnight Commander | 4.0 | Yes | Yes |
| md5 | Message digest fingerprint | 1.0 | Yes | Yes |
| mkisofs | Make an ISO 9660 filesystem | 1.11 | Yes | Yes |
| mtools | DOS filesystem manipulation tools | 3.6 | Yes | Yes |
| samba | SMB/CIFS fileserver for UNIX | 2.0.5a | No | Yes |
| tar | GNU tar | 1.12 | Yes | Yes |
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://skunkware.dev/skunkware/2000/cdrecord/SCO-NOTES.html.
ftp://ftp.fokus.gmd.de/pub/1/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://skunkware.dev/skunkware/2000/osr5/fileutil/cpio/
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://skunkware.dev/skunkware/2000/uw2/Packages/diffutils.pkg
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.
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.
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.
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 unbelievablewill find all occurrences (in all your files!) of "unbelievable" allowing one spelling error;glimpse -F mail arizonawill 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.
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.
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.
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.
MS-DOS Tools
Mtools is a collection of utilities to access MS-DOS disks from Unix without mounting them. It supports Win'95 style long file names, OS/2 Xdf disks and 2m disks (store up to 1992k on a high density 3 1/2 disk). Mtools can now handle the long filenames of Windows NT and Windows 95.
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.
A Windows SMB/CIFS fileserver for UNIX
WHAT IS SAMBA?
Samba is an open source software suite that provides seamless file and print services to SMB/CIFS clients. Samba is freely available under the GNU General Public License
WHAT IS SMB?
The very short answer is that it is the protocol by which a lot of PC-related machines share files and printers and other informatiuon such as lists of available files and printers. Operating systems that support this natively include Windows NT, OS/2, and Linux and add on packages that achieve the same thing are available for DOS, Windows, VMS, Unix of all kinds, MVS, and more. Apple Macs and some Web Browsers can speak this protocol as well. Alternatives to SMB include Netware, NFS, Appletalk, Banyan Vines, Decnet etc; many of these have advantages but none are both public specifications and widely implemented in desktop machines by default.
The Common Internet Filesystem (CIFS) is what the new SMB initiative is called. For details watch http://samba.org/cifs.
WHY DO PEOPLE WANT TO USE SMB?
- Many people want to integrate their Microsoft or IBM style desktop machines with their Unix or VMS (etc) servers.
- Others want to integrate their Microsoft (etc) servers with Unix or VMS (etc) servers. This is a different problem to integrating desktop clients.
- Others want to replace protocols like NFS, DecNet and Novell NCP, especially when used with PCs.
WHAT CAN SAMBA DO?
Here is a very short list of what samba includes, and what it does. For many networks this can be simply summarised by "Samba provides a complete replacement for Windows NT, Warp, NFS or Netware servers."
For a much better overview have a look at the web site at http://samba.org/samba, and browse the user survey.
- a SMB server, to provide Windows NT and LAN Manager-style file and print services to SMB clients such as Windows 95, Warp Server, smbfs and others.
- a NetBIOS (rfc1001/1002) nameserver, which amongst other things gives browsing support. Samba can be the master browser on your LAN if you wish.
- a ftp-like SMB client so you can access PC resources (disks and printers) from 1, Netware and other operating systems
- a tar extension to the client for backing up PCs
- limited command-line tool that supports some of the NT administrative functionality, which can be used on Samba, NT workstation and NT server.
Related packages include:
- smbfs, a linux-only filesystem allowing you to mount remote SMB filesystems from PCs on your linux box. This is included as standard with Linux 2.0 and later.
- tcpdump-smb, a extension to tcpdump to allow you to investigate SMB networking problems over netbeui and tcp/ip.
- smblib, a library of smb functions which are designed to make it easy to smb-ise any particular application. See ftp://samba.org/pub/samba/smblib.
CONTRIBUTIONS
If you want to contribute to the development of the software then please join the mailing list. The Samba team accepts patches (preferably in "diff -u" format, see docs/BUGS.txt for more details) and are always glad to receive feedback or suggestions to the address samba-bugs@samba.org. We have recently put a new bug tracking system into place which should help the throughput quite a lot. You can also get the Samba sourcecode straight from the CVS tree - see http://samba.org/cvs.html.
You could also send hardware/software/money/jewelry or pizza vouchers directly to Andrew. The pizza vouchers would be especially welcome, in fact there is a special field in the survey for people who have paid up their pizza :-)
If you like a particular feature then look through the CVS change-log (on the web at http://samba.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/samba ) and see who added it, then send them an email.
Remember that free software of this kind lives or dies by the response we get. If noone tells us they like it then we'll probably move onto something else. However, as you can see from the user survey quite a lot of people do seem to like it at the moment :-)
Andrew Tridgell Email: samba-bugs@samba.org 3 Ballow Crescent Macgregor, A.C.T. 2615 Australia Samba Team Email: samba-bugs@samba.org
DOCUMENTATION
There is quite a bit of documentation included with the package, including man pages, and lots of .txt files with hints and useful info. This is also available from the web page. There is a growing collection of information under docs/faq; by the next release expect this to be the default starting point.
A list of Samba documentation in languages other than English is available on the web page.
If you would like to help with the documentation (and we _need_ help!) then have a look at the mailing list samba-docs, archived at http://lists.samba.org/
MAILING LIST
There is a mailing list for discussion of Samba. To subscribe send mail to listproc@samba.org with a body of "subscribe samba Your Name" Please do NOT send this request to the list alias instead.
To send mail to everyone on the list mail to samba@listproc.anu.edu.au
There is also an announcement mailing list where new versions are announced. To subscribe send mail to listproc@samba.org with a body of "subscribe samba-announce Your Name". All announcements also go to the samba list.
For details of other Samba mailing lists and for access to archives, see http://lists.samba.org/
NEWS GROUP
You might also like to look at the usenet news group comp.protocols.smb as it often contains lots of useful info and is frequented by lots of Samba users. The newsgroup was initially setup by people on the Samba mailing list. It is not, however, exclusive to Samba, it is a forum for discussing the SMB protocol (which Samba implements). The samba list is gatewayed to this newsgroup.
WEB SITE
A Samba WWW site has been setup with lots of useful info. Connect to:
As well as general information and documentation, this also has searchable archives of the mailing list and a user survey that shows who else is using this package. Have you registered with the survey yet? :-)
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.
Last Updated: Wednesday Feb 16, 2000 at 11:45:24 PST