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