UDF Command-Line Interface

Unless you really love tedium, at some point you might get tired of bringing up UDFAdmin and clicking away for five minutes each day to install new PIDFs, VIDFs, or data.

I got tired of it the first time I did it, and therefore wrote the UDF.pm Perl module. This module contains code reverse-engineered from UDFAdmin. It is intended to provide equivalent functionality, but can be used as a library by any Perl code, without requiring GUIs or other clicky things.

Most people will want the udfadm script. This is a simple wrapper on top of UDF.pm. It provides options for installing new data and rebuilding databases. The second most common invocation will be:

 % udfadm unpack /path/to/data/file

where "/path/..." is a relative or absolute path to one or more of the UDF .tar.gz files (PIDF, VIDF, or data). For example:

 % udfadm unpack IMAGE.IMAGE1.UDFp.199931414.tgz
 % udfadm unpack IMAGE.IMAGE1.UDFv.199931414.tgz
 % udfadm unpack /tmp/IMAGE.IMAGE1.UDFM.*

UDF.pm knows how to handle PIDF, VIDF, and instrument data files. It does all the database things. The above commands are exactly equivalent to running UDFAdmin, clicking on "Add UDF Data", clicking on the relevant "Install" buttons, and clicking on "Process".

The most common invocation should be the one you don't see: from my automated FTP script. There's no reason for you to have to do any of the above by hand.

Installing

1. Download both udfadm and UDF.pm.

2. Put UDF.pm in your site_perl directory.

3. Put udfadm somewhere in your PATH. Fix its first line.

4. While you're at it, take a look at my mirror script. You don't really want to do those ftp's by hand, do you?

Yes, this requires some small UNIX ability. If you can't do it, ask your sysadmin.

It would be nice if I were to package this properly as a Perl module, but without knowing if anyone will even be interested in this code, I can't justify the time expenditure. If you have strong feelings on this, please let me know.

Disclaimer

I'm still new at UDF. Furthermore, all I have to work with is Chris's tcl/tk source code... and I don't speak tcl. It is therefore quite likely that there will be bugs in my code, or at least significant differences between what my code does and what Chris's does.

Please remember that Chris's code is the definitive, official standard. I will try to keep my code in synch with his, and will always attempt to produce identical results, but I cannot guarantee that this will always be the case. I am always willing to receive bug reports.

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