
                            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] <filename(s)>

   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.
          
   (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 programms 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.
          
   -r
          Instructs the program not to ignore replies. Usually, replies
          in postings do not feature useful binary data, so they are
          ignored to save space and time. Only in some cases it might be
          useful not to ignore them, especially when decoding mail
          folders.
          Similarly, '+r' will cause replies to be ignored; which is the
          default.
          
   +d
          Sets the desperate mode, in which the program will also process
          incomplete files. Everything until the first missing part will
          be decoded (if the first part is missing, nothing is decoded).
          The reason is that there are no file formats (except plain
          text) that can recover from missing data. '-d' is default (the
          program hopes that you don't get desperate too frequently).
          
   -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.
          There is no such thing as a +p option.
          
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 to the given path instead. This path must exist.
          
   
   
   
     _________________________________________________________________
   
   
    Frank Pilhofer <fp@informatik.uni-frankfurt.de> Back to the Homepage
    
   Last modified: Wed Oct 18 15:46:53 1995
