7.2  YOUR FRIEND ARCHIE


How do you find a file you want, though?

Until a few years ago, this could be quite the pain -- there was no 
master directory to tell you where a given file might be stored on the 
Net. Who'd want to slog through hundreds of file libraries looking for 
something? 

Alan Emtage, Bill Heelan and Peter Deutsch, students at McGill University 
in Montreal, asked the same question.  Unlike the weather, though, they 
did something about it. 

They created a database system, called archie, that would periodically 
call up file libraries and basically find out what they had available.  
In turn, anybody could dial into archie, type in a file name, and see 
where on the Net it was available. Archie currently catalogs some 1,000 
file libraries around the world. 

Today, there are three ways to ask archie to find a file for you: through 
telnet, "client" Archie program on your own host system or e-mail.  All 
three methods let you type in a full or partial file name and will tell 
you where on the Net it's stored. 

If you have access to telnet, you can telnet to one of the following 
addresses: archie.mcgill.ca; archie.sura.net; archie.unl.edu; 
archie.ans.net; or archie.rutgers.edu.  If asked for a log-in name, type 
 
     archie
 
and hit enter.
     
When you connect, the key command is prog, which you use in this form: 
 
     prog filename
 
Followed by enter, where "filename" is the program or file you're looking 
for. If you're unsure of a file's complete name, try typing in part of 
the name. For example, "PKZIP" will work as well as "PKZIP204.EXE."  The 
system does not support DOS or Unix wildcards.  If you ask archie to look 
for "PKZIP*," it will tell you it couldn't find anything by that name.  
One thing to keep in mind is that a file is not necessarily the same as a 
program -- it could also be a document.  This means you can use archie to 
search for, say, everything online related to the Beetles, as well as 
computer programs and graphics files. 

A number of Net sites now have their own archie programs that take your 
request for information and pass it onto the nearest archie database -- 
ask your system administrator if she has it online. These "client" 
programs seem to provide information a lot more quickly than the actual 
archie itself!  If it is available, at your host system's command line, 
type 
 
     archie -s filename
 
where filename is the program or document you're looking for, and hit 
enter.  The -s tells the program to ignore case in a file name and lets 
you search for partial matches. You might actually want to type it this 
way: 
 
     archie -s filename|more
 
which will stop the output every screen (handy if there are many sites 
that carry the file you want).  Or you could open a file on your computer 
with your text-logging function. 

The third way, for people without access to either of the above, is e-
mail. Send a message to archie@quiche.cs.mcgill.ca. You can leave the 
subject line blank.  Inside the message, type 
 
     prog filename
 
where filename is the file you're looking for.  You can ask archie to 
look up several programs by putting their names on the same "prog" line, 
like this:
                       
     prog file1 file2 file3
      
Within a few hours, archie will write back with a list of the appropriate 
sites. 

In all three cases, if there is a system that has your file, you'll get a 
response that looks something like this: 
 
   Host sumex-aim.stanford.edu
 
     Location: /info-mac/comm
            FILE -rw-r--r--     258256  Feb 15 17:07  zterm-09.hqx
     Location: /info-mac/misc
            FILE -rw-r--r--       7490  Sep 12 1991  zterm-sys7-color-icons.hqx
 
Chances are, you will get a number of similar looking responses for each 
program.  The "host" is the system that has the file.  The "Location" 
tells you which directory to look in when you connect to that system.  
Ignore the funny-looking collections of r's and hyphens for now.  After 
them, come the size of the file or directory listing in bytes, the date 
it was uploaded, and the name of the file.