Getting Started
You will need a command shell. If you don't have one in mind, try:
- Windows: hit Windows+R to open the "run" window. Enter "cmd" for a classic DOS shell or "powershell" for something fancier, and hit Return.
- Linux: you have many options; use "xterm" or "gnome-terminal" to get a window with a shell prompt.
- Mac OS: from the Finder, in the Go menu, select Utilities. From the list of applications, double-click Terminal to launch it.
You will need to download and install CiderPress II. It's convenient to add the "cp2" command to your path. You can do this by adding the installation directory to your PATH environment variable, or by adding a symbolic link to the executable to an existing PATH member, such as ~/bin. If you don't want to do this, you can also just specify the full path to the executable every time.
Some shells interpret certain characters in special ways. For example, in MINGW for
Windows, you can specify the C:\Src directory by referring to it as
"C:\\Src" or "/c/src". In the first case the backslash
was entered twice because '\' is used as an escape character by the shell, and in the
second case the shell interprets an argument with a leading '/' in a special way.
The tutorial will call out places where this sort of thing is likely to be problematic.
The first command you should try is "help":
cp2 help
You should see a usage summary, a list of commands, and a list of options with their default values:
CiderPress II Command-Line Utility v1.0.0 Usage: cp2 <command> [options...] [args...] Commands: add | a : adds files to an archive catalog | v : displays a detailed listing of an archive [...]
Some commands have aliases that are shorter than the full name, for convenience when typing. For example, you can request a listing with cp2 catalog or cp2 v. If you can't remember the syntax of a particular command, you can request help for that specific command. For example, to get help for the "help" command:
cp2 help help
Usage: cp2 help [options] [command] help: displays program usage information
Notes
The tutorial will use various disk images and file archives as examples.
All of these can be found in the CiderPress II source tree, in the
TestData
directory, should you wish to try the commands for yourself.
Disk images are very different from file archives, but in many situations the differences don't matter. This tutorial will sometimes refer to them collectively as "archives".