• How do I download the programs?
• OK, I've downloaded it. Now what?
• I'm having a more specific problem. How do I get more help?

If you have a web browser, you can download the programs. First, don't just click on the link. That will "download" the program into your web browser, and not save it in a file, basically it'll just look strange and be pretty useless.

What you need to "right-click" (not the standard "left-click") on the link with your mouse and get the context-sensitive menu. Once you have that, and pick the option "Save link as..." (or whatever the message is from your particular browser).

If you only have one mouse button (MacOSX), hold down either CTRL- or ALT- or APPLE KEY- when hitting the button until you get a menu when you click on the link.

Now pick a place and a name to save it. And now you've got the file. Easy, right?

Now you want this programs to solve all of your problems. Or at least run. But they don't. So what do you do?

First, is the program named the way you want it. I personally prefer something like cns2fsfour rather than cns2fsfour_irix. So I'd rename it (the names will change as appropriate):

mv cns2fsfour_irix cns2fsfour

Second, you want to tell the operating system that the program can be run (is executable). So issue the following command:

chmod ugo+rx cns2fsfour

Now the program is runnable. So you should be able to run it in the current directory ( the "./" indicates the current directory) like:

./cns2fsfour

But if you want it somewhere more convienent so you don't have to specify the program's position exactly, you have to put it somewhere in your path. The path is a list of directories that the computer looks into to find an executable. You can see what directories are listed by the following command:

echo $path

For example, if /home/username/bin is in your path, you can then copy the executable there ("cp cns2fsfour /home/username/bin"). Note this will only work if you have write access to the directory. Normal users generally don't have permissions to write to directories like /bin, and /usr/bin. This is a good thing.

So what to do if you don't have an appropriate directory to put the program in? Simple. Create one, and append it to your path statement. If you are using the csh or tcsh shells, you can do the following:

mkdir /home/username/bin
cp cns2fsfour /home/username/bin
set path = ( $path /home/username/bin )
rehash

Now adding /home/username/bin need to occur in every shell. For csh and tcsh, you can edit your .cshrc to add them to the path every time, but find a tutorial on .cshrc editing first.

So you're still having problems. You can e-mail me for help, but a report like "it doesn't work" doesn't help, and I will have to immediately ask for more information.

So tell me your platform, your shell (result of a "echo $SHELL" command), how big the program is (result of "ls -l program"), and if it runs at all. If there is an error message, give it to me exactly as the operating system reports it, even if it doesn't make sense to you.

If you follow the steps above, this should handle 99% of the problems that people have when they try to get these programs.