7.5  THE KEYBOARD CABAL
 
 
System administrators are like everybody else -- they try to make things 
easier for themselves.  And when you sit in front of a keyboard all day, 
that can mean trying everything possible to reduce the number of keys you 
actually have to hit each day. 

Unfortunately, that can make it difficult for the rest of us.

You've already read about bin and lost+found directories. Etc is another 
seemingly interesting directory that turns out to be another place to 
store files used by the ftp site itself.  Again, nothing of any real 
interest. 

Then, once you get into the actual file libraries, you'll find that in 
many cases, files will have such non-descriptive names as V1.1-AK.TXT.  
The best known example is probably a set of several hundred files known 
as RFCs, which provide the basic technical and organizational information 
on which much of the Internet is built.  These files can be found on many 
ftp sites, but always in a form such as RFC101.TXT, RFC102.TXT and so on, 
with no clue whatsoever as to what information they contain. 

Fortunately, almost all ftp sites have a "Rosetta Stone" to help you 
decipher these names.  Most will have a file named README (or some 
variant) that gives basic information about the system.  Then, most 
directories will either have a similar README file or will have an index 
that does give brief descriptions of each file.  These are usually the 
first file in a directory and often are in the form 00INDEX.TXT.  Use the 
ftp command to get this file.  You can then scan it online or download it 
to see which files you might be interested in. 

Another file you will frequently see is called ls-lR.Z.  This contains a 
listing of every file on the system, but without any descriptions (the 
name comes from the Unix command ls -lR, which gives you a listing of all 
the files in all your directories).  The Z at the end means the file has 
been compressed, which means you will have to use a Unix un-compress 
command before you can read the file. 

And finally, we have those system administrators who almost seem to 
delight in making things difficult -- the ones who take full advantage of 
Unix's ability to create absurdly long file names.  On some FTP sites, 
you will see file names as long as 80 characters or so, full of capital 
letters, underscores and every other orthographic device that will make 
it almost impossible for you to type the file name correctly when you try 
to get it. Your secret weapon here is the mget command.  Just type mget, 
a space, and the first five or six letters of the file name, followed by 
an asterisk, for example: 
 
     mget This_F*
 
The FTP site will ask you if you want to get the file that begins with 
that name. If there are several files that start that way, you might have 
to answer 'n' a few times, but it's still easier than trying to recreate 
a ludicrously long file name.