CPAN/ENDINGS
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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.
.Z compressed with "compress", "uncompress" to uncompress
.gz compressed with "gzip", "gunzip" (or "gzip -d") 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.
.tgZ .tar.Z in disguise for DOS, see below for "MULTIPLE ENDINGS"
.tgz .tar.gz ditto, ditto
.taz .tar.gz ditto, ditto
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.Z First "uncompress", then "tar". Often mangled for
DOSish systems as .tgZ, .tgz, or .taz.
.tar.gz First "gunzip", then "tar".
.uu.gz First "gunzip", then "uudecode".
.shar.gz First "gunzip", then "unshar".
Note 1:
The GNU zip, "gunzip", "gzip -d", can uncompress both .Z and .gz
gunzip foo.Z
gunzip bar.gz
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.
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