Launch Anarchie - always a good start in any tutorial :-)
First things first. Whenever you try out a new program, check out the About box and Preferences. The About box doesn’t require too much explaining. Now, choose Preferences from the Edit menu (Quinn assures me that the Preferences menu item should always be in the Edit menu, and it doesn’t do to argue with Quinn on Human Interface matters!). Fill in the Email address field with your Email address (eg, mine is “peter.lewis@info.curtin.edu.au”, but use your own, not mine! :-) (BTW, English teachers may tell you that that comma should be inside the quotes. They are no doubt right, but it’s patently stupid, so I ignore them). You might want to set your preferred font and size, I like Monaco 9 point myself, but probably just because I’m use to it. Turning on logging is often useful. Anarchie logs to a file called “Anarchie Log” in the Preferences folder, and you can look at it with the Show Log command. Double-clicking on an entry in the log window will refetch it. Logging is useful for when you know you downloaded a file previously, but can’t remember where you got it from. By default, Anarchie saves files into your desktop (so you can clean up later with the Finder instead of having to use the Standard File horror). If you prefer, set a different directory to store files into. The country code should be set for you from your Mac’s DNS name. If it can’t figure it out, it will let you set it yourself. The Country Code is only used for sorting purposes to figure out the best servers or to list hosts in the best order. If you’ve sent off your cheque to me already (pretty silly, you haven’t even looked at the program yet!) you can click the “I paid” check box. All it does is stop the About box from appearing at startup, but please don’t do this until you really have paid. Click Save to save your changes.
Ok, now say you want to find DeHQX (I don’t know why you’d want to, StuffIt Expander is much better, but just pretend you want to find DeHQX). Choose Archie… from the file menu. Pick a server from the popup menu. In principle you should pick a nearby server. In practice it doesn’t much matter. Besides, the servers don’t respond half the time so you end up picking a different one anyway.
Now, what you type in the Find field depends on what setting you have chosen. The simplest is Sub-string. The Archie server will return files whose names contain what you type in the search filed. In this case, “dehqx” would be a good choice. But what if there was a program called DeHQX on other machines. In that case you might want to limit yourself to just Mac programs. Well, you can’t do that, but you can search for just BinHex files by telling it you want only files that match the pattern “dehqx*.hqx”, that is they have “dehqx” followed by any characters (that’s what the “*” means) followed by “.hqx”. Note that the filename doesn’t have to start with “dehqx”. “dehqx” must come before “.hqx”, that’s all. For example the server might return a program called “codehqx2.hqxfile”. Really patterns offer all the flexibility you are likely to want. Ignore the next paragraph.
Ok, Regular Expressions. These come from over in Un•x land, and are thus incomprehensible to mere mortals. But naturally they have a lot of power. There are better places to learn about regular expressions than here, but I’ll list out some of the import bits. “^” means “at the start”, “$” means at the end, “.” matches any character, “\” stops the next character from being special, “[abcde]” matches any character from a through e (you can also write things like “[A-Za-z0-9]” which matches any letter or number), “*” matches zero or more of the preceding character, “+” matches one or more of the preceding character. So if you were looking for version 2 or 3 of DeHQX in BinHex format, you might try “^dehqx.*[23].*\.hqx$”. Fun hey? If you have a Un•x account, you can find out more about Regular Expressions by reading the relevant chapter in the “ed” man page (“man ed”). Note that patterns are simply converted textually into Regular Expressions (by replacing “*” with “.*” and so on), so you can make patterns like “^dehqx*.hqx$” and it will work.
Finally, set the maximum number of matches you want returned (the smaller the number, the faster the search (as well as less load on the server, be a good little net citizen!). 40 is usually plenty. Turn on case sensitivity if you really want to (it’s usually a bad idea though, since you can never guarantee what case a file will be in on a given FTP site). Now click Find. Anarchie will go off and query the server. While it’s doing this, it displays a cryptic little progress window saying how many packets Anarchie has sent, how many it has gotten back, how many contiguous chunks of information it has received (and when the server finally tells Anarchie, it lets you know how many total chunks it needs to receive). When it gets all the chunks, it assembles them into a Display window.
The Display Window - this is basically just a list of files together with information about them and where to get them from. In many respects this window behaves like a Finder window. You can click the headers to sort by the various columns, type in part of a name to select it, double click and it will open the folder, or fetch the file. The “Zone” column is not inherently obvious, it is a number that represents the “distance” the site is from you. It is one for sites in your country, two for sites on your continent (more or less :-), three for the USA, four for Canada, five for everywhere else. This seems to me to be a fairly close approximation to the Internet layout.
Ok, so we have our DeHQX listing, find one that looks promising, and double click it. Anarchie will fetch it directly to your Mac, and since its a BinHex file, it will forward it on to StuffIt Expander to decode. Pretty neat huh?
But what if you just want to look for a file on Umich’s archive? Well, Anarchie can do that too. Simply choose Get… from the File menu, and type in the host name “mac.archive.umich.edu” and the path “/mac” (or just type in “mac.archive.umich.edu:/mac” into the host field, or if you like URL’s (Universal Resource Locator’s), you can type them in as well). It’s a directory, so make sure to select “Fetch Listing”. Now click List, and presto, another Display Window, this time listing the files on Umich. What? Umich won’t let you in because there are too many people already connected? No problem, just pick a mirror site. Choose List Bookmarks and Anarchie will display yet another Display Window, this time with a list of lots of sites for you to loot. Choose one of the Umich mirrors and double-click it. Or maybe you want Info-Mac instead?
Ok, but say you want a quick way to check out the game directory, you don’t want to have to start from the top each time. Simply open up one of the mirrors, select the game entry, and instead of double-clicking to fetch it, choose Save Bookmark from the file menu, save that bookmark on the desktop. Now close all Anarchie’s windows, and switch into the finder, double-click the bookmark file, and presto (again! :-), Anarchie displays the games directory. Heck, you could move that file into the Startup Items folder, and then everytime your mac starts up, Anarchie will list out the game directory (no, don’t do this, it’s very silly :-). If you move the bookmark file into Anarchie’s Bookmarks folder it will appear when you choose List Bookmarks (but be careful when you upgrade Anarchie that you don’t lose your old bookmarks!).
What is that “View” menu item? If you want to read a file (say one of those ReadMe files that the FTP sites are always telling you to read, or maybe an Abstracts file?), select the file in a Display window, and choose View Selection from the file menu. Anarchie will download it in ASCII mode into the normal download directory, and then open it in a text editor. Which text editor? Well, it checks Dartmouth Fetch’s suffix mappings, and sees what file format you’ve set for “.txt” and uses that. Anarchie honours Dartmouth Fetch’s suffix mappings whenever it downloads a file, so make sure you’ve set them up to your liking.
What happens if the fetch fails? Well, simply choose Retry from the File menu to retry the fetch (make sure you don’t close that progress window, or it’ll be lost forever). You could also hold the option key down while choosing Edit Retry and that will let you modify the name. If you know you’ve fetched the file some time back, and you’ve turned on logging, then you can also use the Show Log command to display the log window, find the entry in there for the file, and double-click that to refetch it.
Ok, say someone posts a silly question like “Where can I find Disinfectant?”. Well, you can show them how clever you are, by simply choosing Find… from the File menu, then search for “disinfectant*.hqx”. When the search comes back, select half a dozen likely candidates (use command and shift clicking to select multiple entries (be careful not to accidentally double-click or you’ll end up with half a dozen copies of Disinfectant :-)). Now choose Copy from the edit menu, and paste it into your reply to them. It will copy them in the normal host:path format, one to a line. Of course, in the case of Disinfectant, Anarchie comes with a preset bookmark, so just choose List Bookmarks, select the Disinfectant one and copy that.
What does “Fetch Server List” do? It fetches the current server list from a site in Texas. Chris Johnson (author of Gatekeeper and Cron, and generally a nice guy!) was kind enough to set this up for me. Archie servers come and go very slowly, so don’t bother choosing this more than once or twice a year.
