Ron's Indexing Program (RIP)
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Console-based text indexing, retrieval, and browsing

MS-DOS

All of the MS-DOS material can be downloaded as a single zip-file. This zip-file contains the source-code and executable of the DOS command-line program that compress/indexes etext and searches/browses etext. Upon unzipping this file -- say, with pkzip or WinZip -- you'll find these directories:

RIP\exe	Executable program (RIP.EXE) and data file (RIP_ALLF.DAT). There are many possiblities for configuring the system in various ways (refer to the documentation), but the simplest way is to create sub-directories under RIP\exe to store your etext files.
RIP\docs	Documentation in PDF, Microsoft Word, and Star Office 6 format.
RIP\rip	Source code, if you want to experiment or rebuild the code.

This version of the program also works in an MS-DOS window in Win32. (Windows 98, for example.) It seems likely that this version is frozen for all time, and will never change.

UNIX-type Systems

**Downloads (source/docs/binaries)**
Description	Download
Current development version* (20020420)	RIP-dev.tar.gz
20020420 snapshot	RIP-20020420.tar.gz
20020324 snapshot	RIP-20020324.tar.gz

* May not contain current executables.

If you are using Linux for Intel 'x86, Linux for PowerPC, or FreeBSD, the binaries for your platforms have already been built for you (at least in the snapshot tarballs). You'll see appropriate directories for each platform:

RIP/LinuxIntel
RIP/LinuxPPC
RIP/FreeBSD

If you don't want to use this directory as the repository for your etext database, you will also want to create a directory for that -- say, for the sake of discussion, ~/MyEtexts. Simply copy the contents of one of RIP/LinuxIntel, RIP/LinuxPPC, or RIP/FreeBSD (whichever is appropriate) into ~/MyEtexts, and you're done!

If you are not using one of these particular systems, you'll have to compile the program yourself, as described in the following section.

Compiling under *nix

In order to build RIP in a UNIX-like system, there are the following requirements:

The GNU gcc compiler.
The GNU make program.
The ncurses library.
The TurboC library.

Of these, only the latter is likely to be missing from a *nix system. You must download the TurboC library and install it. Having done so, building RIP itself is quite easy:

cd RIP/ripUnix
make

On some platforms, the GNU make program is not the default; for example, on FreeBSD, the GNU make program is actually named gmake, and you'll have to substitute appropriately. Also, the Makefile is written to assume that GNU gcc can be accessed as cc. This works on Linux, FreeBSD, and Mac OS X, but if it doesn't work on your system you'll have to edit the Makefile accordingly.

By the way, I'd think that RIP is unlikely to work well on Mac OS X, because the TurboC library has not been made to work well there.

The build-process generally produces quite a few warning messages, of which the following is typical:

rip.c:1256: warning: long unsigned int format, uint32_t arg (arg 2)

This message relates to the fact that in a call to sprintf, gcc cannot tell that the uint32_t datatype is appropriate for a "%lu" format specifier. This actually is appropriate on all 32-bit systems, but may not be appropriate on 64-bit systems.

Typically, you will also want to create a directory for your etext database -- say, for the sake of discussion, ~/MyEtexts. Simply copy RIP/ripUnix/rip and RIP/ripUnix/allf_rip.dat into ~/MyEtexts, and you're done!

Contents

MS-DOS

UNIX-type Systems

Compiling under *nix