README.TOOLS

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HOW TO INSTALL

	To generate the tools in the src/tools directory, change to that
directory, and do a 'configure', and then a 'make'. Some of the tools here
require awk. You can ftp GNU awk from ftp.gnu.ai.mit.edu. The database tools
currently only support a disk-based database (but have not been updated to
work with TinyMUSH 3.1).

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DATABASE TOOLS

	There's a binary here, in rawdump which walks your gdbm
database and runs out a raw report of the form:

Object 214 resides at offset 31488 and takes 312 bytes
Object 17 resides at offset 4352 and takes 7125 bytes
etc..

	There's also a shell script, report.sh and an awk script useful
for generating histograms from input. The basic plan is that you find
your gdbm database, for example if your database lives in files:

foo.gdbm.db
foo.gdbm

	then your database is named 'foo.gdbm'. Then you can 'report.sh
foo.gdbm' to get pretty pictures of stuff. Since the shell script wants to
find both the raw reporter 'rawdump' and the awk script 'histogrammer' in
the path, it's probably best to run this in the tools subdirectory, and point
it at the database file with an explicit path. For example:

report.sh ../../game/data/tinymush.gdbm

	or something.

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PORT ANNOUNCER

	The other tool is a binary called announce. This is a program that
listens on a port (default 6250) and responds to connections by printing
a message. You can use this to tell people what's going on while your MUSH
is down or after you've moved it to another host / port.

	To use the announcer, first write your message in a text file, say
announce.txt. Then start the announcer (specify the port number if you need
to, 4201 in this example):

announce 4201 < announce.txt > announce.log 2>&1 &	(sh-like shell)
announce 4201 < announce.txt >& announce.log &		(csh-like shell)

	To stop the announcer when you need to change the message or quit
announcing altogether, you will need to kill the process. Use one of these
to find the process:

ps uxw | grep announce		(BSD systems)
ps -ef | grep announce		(SYSV systems)

	The PID should be the number in the second column; use 'kill pid'
to end the process. Note that the port may stay in use for a minute or so
after the announcer has exited; you may have trouble starting up the MUSH
right after the announcer has exited, or vice versa. You can probably use
netstat to see when the port becomes available.