arxtools 0.4.0 review

arxtools is a collection of tools to create, examine and modify ARX archives from the command line

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 0K Developer: Hagen Mobius

0

arxtools is a collection of tools to create, examine and modify ARX archives from the command line. arxtools uses the libarxx library to load, modify and save the archives. arxtools is not yet complete but working and should be tested thorougly.

The arxtools collection currently consists of 9 tools. These are: arxadd, arxarchive, arxdump, arxget, arxlist, arxmerge, arxmod, arxstructure, arxtouch.

arxadd

arxadd allows you to recursively add files from your local file tree to an ARX archive.

arxarchive

arxarchive can retrieve or set an archive's root item ID.

This tool will be the second to remove because part its functionlity is provided by arxget and the other part can be added to arxstructure.

arxdump

arxdump will dump the content of a particular item identified by its unique ID to the standard output.

This tool will be the first to remove because its functionlity can be provided by arxget which is even more powerful since it can resolve paths starting at the archive's root item.

arxget

arxget is a multi purpose tool to get every bit of information provided by an ARX archive. It is able to resolve paths starting at the root item of an archive and to identify items by their unique ID.

arxlist

arxlist is a simple ls command for your ARX archive. It is not yet able to resolve paths and needs the unique ID of the item you want to list. It prints out various information about the item in question and about the relations of that item. Without any item identifier it lists all items in an archive.

This tool could eventually be removed as well because its functionlity is to get information about an item. This could also be done with arxget.

arxmerge

arxmerge is an attempt to bring merging functionality to the command line. If given two ARX achives it will merge them based on a configurable sequence of Rules. Refer to the reference documentation of libarxx to learn more about merging.

arxmod

arxmod can modify item meta information like name, version, type, subtype, version and unique ID. Additionally it can enforce compression or decompression of items and remove them from the archive.

arxstructure
arxstructure can be used to modify an item's structural information. It can add and delete items references.

This tool will be removed because its functionality - modifying structure - is very closely related to that of arxmod since structural information is meta information as well.

arxtouch

arxtouch can create empty archives where there are none and create empty items in archives.

What's New in This Release:
This release adds some important features like path resolution and getting information about items and relations.
It also improves some other features like the parsing of numeric values on the command line.
However, the most important change is that three tools have been removed.
arxdump is replaced by an improved arxget, arxstructure has been integrated into arxmod, and arxarchive has been split between the two.
This means that the tool suite is now nearly minimal and the interface will not be reduced for some time now.