/src/ENDINGS

  1CPAN/ENDINGS
  2
  3---
  4
  5FUNNY FILE ENDINGS AND WHAT TO DO ABOUT THEM
  6
  7  The files in the CPAN have all kinds of curious endings (the parts
  8  after dots) and one must know what to do about them. The tools you
  9  need to run are marked like "this", inside double quotes, in the
 10  below list. Because CPAN is not just one place we cannot point
 11  you explicitly to the tools for your particular system, you have to
 12  locate them for your system, sorry. Try out whether your system
 13  already has them installed. If not, ask your local user support
 14  and/or search for them via the WWW search engines or the archie.
 15
 16  In Win32 (95/98/NT/W2K) "WinZip" should be able to unpack the most
 17  usual archival and compression formats.
 18
 19  In MacIntosh StuffIt should work.
 20
 21  Archives and/or Compressed/Packed
 22
 23  .tar	Tape ARchive (never mind the 'tape' part, historical reasons,
 24	disk will do just fine). Program called "tar" will help,
 25	"tar tvf foo.tar" will list the contents, "tar xvf foo.tar"
 26	will extract the contents.
 27  .gz	compressed with "gzip", "gunzip" (or "gzip -d") to uncompress
 28  .bz2  compressed with "bzip2", "bunzip2" (or "bzip2 -d") to uncompress
 29  .tgz		.tar.gz in disguise for DOS, see below for "MULTIPLE ENDINGS"
 30  .tbz		.tar.bz2 ditto,              ditto
 31  .tbz2		.tar.bz2 ditto,              ditto
 32  .taz		.tar.gz ditto,               ditto
 33  .tgZ		.tar.Z ditto,                ditto
 34  .Z	compressed with "compress", "uncompress" to uncompress
 35  .uu	UUencoded with "uuencode", "uudecode" to decode
 36	(note: the first line of the .uu file tells the name
 37         of the un-uuencoded file that will appear when you uudecode)
 38  .shar	SHell ARchive: can be extracted in UNIX either with "unshar -c"
 39        or "unshar" or "sh".
 40  .zip	PCish archive, "unzip -l foo.zip" to list the contents,
 41	"unzip -x foo.zip" to extract, "unzip -h" for help.
 42  .bin  MacIntoshish archive, StuffIt should work. In UNIX
 43	a program called "mcvert" should work.
 44  .sit	MacIntoshish archive, StuffIt should work. In UNIX
 45	a program called "unsit" should work.
 46  .hqx  MacIntoshish archive, StuffIt should work.
 47  .zoo  Amigaish/Atarish archive, zoo should work.
 48
 49  Code and/or Documentation
 50
 51  .pl	PerL: perl script, any Perl version
 52  .pm	Perl Module: Perl 5 onwards code
 53  .pod  Plain Old Documentation: perl documentation,
 54	quite readable as-is but if needed converters like pod2man,
 55	pod2html, exist in the Perl 5 distribution (CPAN/src/5.0/)
 56  .xs	Perl eXtenSion code, please see the perlxs documentation
 57	coming with the Perl 5 distribution
 58  .man	UNIX man(1) manual page format (nroff)
 59  .1	ditto
 60  .html	HyperText Markup Language: the Web-speak
 61  .tex	TeX or LaTeX formatted text
 62  .txt	Text
 63		
 64  Graphics
 65
 66  .xbm	X11 BitMap, view with e.g. "xv"
 67  .gif	Graphics Interchange Format, view with e.g. "xv"
 68  .ps	PostScript: you probably have a laser printer that groks this
 69	and possibly have a previewer like ghostscript ("gs", "gv") that will
 70	display this on screen
 71  .dvi	DeVice Independent: TeX portable graphics display format:
 72	converters like "dvips" (DVI -> PostScript) and previewers
 73        like "xdvi" (X Window DVI) exist.
 74
 75"BUT I HAVE MULTIPLE ENDINGS..."
 76
 77  The endings are recursive, work your way down from the right.
 78
 79  .tar.gz	First "gunzip", then "tar".
 80  .tar.bz2	First "bunzip2", then "tar".
 81  .tar.Z	First "uncompress", then "tar". Often mangled for
 82		DOSish systems as .tgZ, .tgz, or .taz.
 83  .uu.gz	First "gunzip", then "uudecode".
 84  .shar.gz	First "gunzip", then "unshar".
 85
 86Note 1:
 87
 88  The GNU zip, "gunzip", "gzip -d", can uncompress both .gz and .Z
 89
 90	gunzip bar.gz
 91	gunzip foo.Z
 92
 93  It cannot uncompress .bz2, though.
 94
 95Note 2:
 96
 97  The GNU tar, often installed as "gnutar" or "gtar", can use "gunzip" if
 98  it can find it, one does not need to first uncompress and then "tar" but
 99  can instead do both in one sweep:
100
101	gtar ztvf foo.tar.gz
102
103  will list the contents of the gzipped foo.tar without having foo.tar
104  in the disk.  
105
106-- 
107cpan@perl.org
108