CPAN/ENDINGS

---

FUNNY FILE ENDINGS AND WHAT TO DO ABOUT THEM

  The files in the CPAN have all kinds of curious endings (the parts
  after dots) and one must know what to do about them. The tools you
  need to run are marked like "this", inside double quotes, in the
  below list. Because CPAN is not just one place we cannot point
  you explicitly to the tools for your particular system, you have to
  locate them for your system, sorry. Try out whether your system
  already has them installed. If not, ask your local user support
  and/or search for them via the WWW search engines or the archie.

  In Win32 (95/98/NT/W2K) "WinZip" should be able to unpack the most
  usual archival and compression formats.

  In MacIntosh StuffIt should work.

  Archives and/or Compressed/Packed

  .tar	Tape ARchive (never mind the 'tape' part, historical reasons,
	disk will do just fine). Program called "tar" will help,
	"tar tvf foo.tar" will list the contents, "tar xvf foo.tar"
	will extract the contents.
  .gz	compressed with "gzip", "gunzip" (or "gzip -d") to uncompress
  .bz2  compressed with "bzip2", "bunzip2" (or "bzip2 -d") to uncompress
  .tgz		.tar.gz in disguise for DOS, see below for "MULTIPLE ENDINGS"
  .tbz		.tar.bz2 ditto,              ditto
  .tbz2		.tar.bz2 ditto,              ditto
  .taz		.tar.gz ditto,               ditto
  .tgZ		.tar.Z ditto,                ditto
  .Z	compressed with "compress", "uncompress" to uncompress
  .uu	UUencoded with "uuencode", "uudecode" to decode
	(note: the first line of the .uu file tells the name
         of the un-uuencoded file that will appear when you uudecode)
  .shar	SHell ARchive: can be extracted in UNIX either with "unshar -c"
        or "unshar" or "sh".
  .zip	PCish archive, "unzip -l foo.zip" to list the contents,
	"unzip -x foo.zip" to extract, "unzip -h" for help.
  .bin  MacIntoshish archive, StuffIt should work. In UNIX
	a program called "mcvert" should work.
  .sit	MacIntoshish archive, StuffIt should work. In UNIX
	a program called "unsit" should work.
  .hqx  MacIntoshish archive, StuffIt should work.
  .zoo  Amigaish/Atarish archive, zoo should work.

  Code and/or Documentation

  .pl	PerL: perl script, any Perl version
  .pm	Perl Module: Perl 5 onwards code
  .pod  Plain Old Documentation: perl documentation,
	quite readable as-is but if needed converters like pod2man,
	pod2html, exist in the Perl 5 distribution (CPAN/src/5.0/)
  .xs	Perl eXtenSion code, please see the perlxs documentation
	coming with the Perl 5 distribution
  .man	UNIX man(1) manual page format (nroff)
  .1	ditto
  .html	HyperText Markup Language: the Web-speak
  .tex	TeX or LaTeX formatted text
  .txt	Text
		
  Graphics

  .xbm	X11 BitMap, view with e.g. "xv"
  .gif	Graphics Interchange Format, view with e.g. "xv"
  .ps	PostScript: you probably have a laser printer that groks this
	and possibly have a previewer like ghostscript ("gs", "gv") that will
	display this on screen
  .dvi	DeVice Independent: TeX portable graphics display format:
	converters like "dvips" (DVI -> PostScript) and previewers
        like "xdvi" (X Window DVI) exist.

"BUT I HAVE MULTIPLE ENDINGS..."

  The endings are recursive, work your way down from the right.

  .tar.gz	First "gunzip", then "tar".
  .tar.bz2	First "bunzip2", then "tar".
  .tar.Z	First "uncompress", then "tar". Often mangled for
		DOSish systems as .tgZ, .tgz, or .taz.
  .uu.gz	First "gunzip", then "uudecode".
  .shar.gz	First "gunzip", then "unshar".

Note 1:

  The GNU zip, "gunzip", "gzip -d", can uncompress both .gz and .Z

	gunzip bar.gz
	gunzip foo.Z

  It cannot uncompress .bz2, though.

Note 2:

  The GNU tar, often installed as "gnutar" or "gtar", can use "gunzip" if
  it can find it, one does not need to first uncompress and then "tar" but
  can instead do both in one sweep:

	gtar ztvf foo.tar.gz

  will list the contents of the gzipped foo.tar without having foo.tar
  in the disk.  

-- 
cpan@perl.org