Miscellaneous Programs

Welcome to my program page. This is where I get to distribute any software that I think deserves some publicity but which isn't significant enough to be put on an ftp site or posted to a newsgroup.

Ian.Collier@comlab.ox.ac.uk

Last updated: 3 October 2005 (before that, 9 February 2003).

Contents

Plan

The "plan" program is a short C program for maintaining a .plan file. Whenever it is executed it selects a random plan from a plans file. Optionally, it can also keep track of where you are logged in, so that people can find you (for talk, etc.) using "finger".

Here are the files you need for the plan program.

Name                  Size  Last Updated  Description

plan.info             2570  Aug 12  1994  the instructions
plan.c                4311  Aug 12  1994  the C source.

Fulist version 2.32

The "fulist" program is a file listing utility, based on FULIST from the CMS operating system. A list of files is presented in an interactive display. You can page back and forth through the list, and also execute a command on any file by typing the command next to the file name.

Version 2.0 fulist was a complete rewrite which fixed most of the problems of earlier versions. In particular, handling of commands which write output to the screen is much better, the dependence on ls(1) has been removed, and after a command is executed on a file the listing for that file is properly updated. The escape character has been changed from `/' to `\', though it is possible to allow the former for backward compatibility (or to increase compatibility with the CMS FULIST command).

I have successfully compiled fulist on Solaris and Linux; previously I have had success with SunOS, IRIX, HP-UX and OSF/1.

Here are the files you need for fulist.

Name                  Size  Last Updated  Description

fulist.info           3093  Jan  6  1999  the compilation instructions
fulist.c            102460  Feb  6 17:00  the C source
fulist.1             27567  Jan 28 17:11  the man page
fulist.shorthelp      1346  Sep  6  1994  the short help
fulist.wishlist        313  Jan 28 16:51  the "todo" list.

Oneword

The "oneword" program is a silly program for mediating between users who have to write a story one word at a time.
Name                  Size  Last Updated  Description

oneword.info          1564  Aug 15  1994  description and instructions
oneword.c             4208  Jun 27  1996  the C source.
A more detailed set of rules and instructions is available, which I wrote for the members of ECSlab at the time when I was originally requested to set up the program.

It is some time since the height of the program's activity in this lab, but there is a story which has accumulated over the last few months. Caution: this is an example of how not to write a story. Certain contributors seem to have been rather silly, and often rather vulgar...

Software used in making these WWW pages

You may have noticed that this page contains the size and date of each file. Within this collection of pages there are also some pages which consist of a piece of text followed by a list of files. There is also the REXX/imc documentation, which has been automatically split into sections and tagged with HTML. Three Rexx programs were used to create these effects. I have made them available in case you are curious to know how it was done.

The programs have been run with REXX/imc on a Sun Workstation and seem to work (obviously), but there are no guarantees of portability. In particular, none of them runs on Regina without alteration, although the makedocs program contains an alternative "newer()" function which works on Regina 0.07a. The main problem is the use of a unix program as a function, as in:

   output = 'ls'('-alL',name)
which gives slightly different results between REXX/imc and Regina.

If you wish to run any of these programs you must edit the program and change the names of directories and so on as appropriate. The programs should contain enough information within for you to be able to run them.

The three programs follow.

Name                  Size  Last Updated  Description

makeindex1            2162  Aug 15  1994  to make text with files in (like this)
makeindex2            1586  Aug 15  1994  to make a list of files with some text
makedocs             13388  Aug 14  1994  to make the REXX/imc documentation.


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