UUDEVIEW FOR DOS MANUAL This file describes both how to use the decoder and how to use the encoder. Decoding with UUDeview Before you can begin Decoding Before you can begin decoding, you must save the newsfiles from your newsreader into one or many files. If you don't know how to do this, read my article on saving from newsreaders. In the following part, we will assume that you have stored the news articles somewhere on disk, either in a single file or in multiple files. Running the Decoder You simply start the Decoder from the command line ... uudeview [options] If you have multiple files to decode, you can also use wildcards for the filename. The Decoder will immediately start scanning the input files for decodable data. During this time, it prints a line of information for every part found. This information may look a little weird, but as long as everything works well, you can safely ignore these messages. One reason why they're in is that you know the program's working. But if decoding fails, the messages are a great help in locating the problem. This scanning phase may take a while, especially with large input files. Then, a short summary is printed with the files found and their parts. Now, you are presented with all the files that look like they could be decoded, one at a time. You can choose individually for each file whether to decode it or not. To do so, you can enter the following commands: Decoder Commands (?) gives a short list of all available commands. (d) decodes the file and writes it to disk. Files are always written to the directory where you have started uudeview. Therefore, you should always start up uudeview from your binaries directory (I always change to /tmp). If the file already exists on your hard disk, you will be prompted wheter you want to overwrite the existing file, or rename the new one. (y) 'yes', does exactly the same as (d) (n) Do not decode this file and go to the next file. (b) Step back to the previous file. (i) Show file Info. Prints out the zeroeth part of the file if available, or the first part up to the beginning of encoded data. Some of the most annoying headers are stripped. (e) Run a shell command. The best part is, you can actually use the actual file as part of the command! Simply enter a dollar sign '$' where the filename shall appear. If you have qpv installed, you can view a picture before decoding by entering "qpv $". Note that the shell will not get the actual filename but a temporary filename. Using programs that depend on a fixed filename extension will fail. (l) will list a text file. You'll get a lot of junk if you try this command on anything other than text files. (r) prompts you for an alternate filename. If you later (d)ecode the file, it will be written under this new filename. Any directory will be stripped from this filename. (p) allows you to change the save path, that is, the directory where decoded binaries will be saved to. You can see the present path in the command description (which you get with the (?) command). (q) quits the program without prompting for all the other files. (c) displays the copyright notice and some other blah. UUDeview Options One or more of these options can be given on the command line to modify the behaviour of the decoder. +e Describes a set of extensions to be decoded exclusively. You must line up the extensions, each one preceded by a dot with no space between two extensions. +e .jpg.gif instructs the program to ignore postings other than jpg or gif pictures. Note that the extension check is case sensitive. All this has to change sometimes, because this doesn't allow double extensions (like in .tar.gz). -e is the reverse of +e. Here, you can give a set of extensions that the program should ignore, with the same limitations as above. -e .bmp tells the program to process everything but Windows Bitmap files. Please note that each 'e' option cancels all previous ones. Only the last 'e' option is used. Despite their limits, both options are quite useful in conjunction with the following one. -i Tells UUDeview to process the files without user interaction. That is, all files are decoded to the current directory without asking (batch decoding). With the 'e' options, you can direct the program not to process some types of files. +e .jpg.gif -i automagically decodes all pictures. Similarly, '+i' will enable user interaction; but this is really not needed because it's the default. -o Instructs the program to overwrite files already there when decoding. The default is to prompt the user whether the file shall be overwritten, renamed or skipped. -f Uses fast mode for scanning of input files. The program will assume that each input file holds at most one article. This option breaks decoding of input files with multiple articles. Furthermore, incomplete files aren't detected until the decoding step. -t Process text messages. Will offer plain-text messages and non-encoded parts from MIME messages for "decoding". Since these kinds of messages usually don't have a filename associated with them, they receive filenames like "0001.txt". -d Sets the desperate mode, in which the program will also process incomplete files. This is useful if you are missing the last part of a 50-parts posting, but in most cases the desperately-decoded files will simply be corrupt and unusable. The degree of usefulness of an incomplete file depends on the file type. In desperate mode, the decoder will also try to detect short Base64 files outside of MIME messages. This is normally disabled, because these desperate tries to find Base64 encoding may cause misdetenction of encoded data, again resulting in invalid files. -p path Sets the decoding path, that is, the path, where decoded binaries will be saved to. If you use the program interactively, you can also set it from within the program. Encoding with UUEnview This section describes how to encode files with the UUenview utility. It's naming as view is probably a bit boasted, since it is a pure command line utility that takes filenames from the command line, encodes them and finishes. The files given on the command line are encoded and written into files with the same base name as the original file and extensions of .001, .002 etc (as many files are used as necessary enforced by the -lines option, see below). UUEnview Options UUenview has the following command line options: -v Verbously prints everything the program's trying to do. -u Chooses the uuencoding method. This is the default. -x Chooses the xxencoding method. -b Chooses the Base64 encoding method as specified by the MIME standard. This scheme is expected to become the future standard. -lines Sets the maximum number of encoded lines per part. The encoded data is automatically split into as many parts as required. Line counts less than 200 are ignored. The uuencoding and xxencoding methods encode 45k, and Base64 encodes 57k of data in 1000 lines. -od path Instead of creating encoded files in the current directory, they are saved into the given path. This path must exist. _________________________________________________________________ UUDeview and UUEnview (c) 1994-1996 by Frank Pilhofer