followed by enter, where "filename" is the program or file you're looking for. If you're unsure of a file's complete name, try typing in part of the name. For example, "PKZIP" will work as well as "PKZIP204.EXE." The system does not support DOS or Unix wildcards. If you ask archie to look for "PKZIP*," it will tell you it couldn't find anything by that name. One thing to keep in mind is that a file is not necessarily the same as a program — it could also be a document. This means you can use archie to search for, say, everything online related to the Beetles, as well as computer programs and graphics files. A number of Net sites now have their own archie programs that take your request for information and pass it onto the nearest archie database — ask your system administrator if she has it online. These "client" programs seem to provide information a lot more quickly than the actual archie itself! If it is available, at your host system's command line, type
archie -s filename
where filename is the program or document you're looking for, and hit enter. The -s tells the program to ignore case in a file name and lets you search for partial matches. You might actually want to type it this way:
archie -s filename|more
which will stop the output every screen (handy if there are many sites that carry the file you want). Or you could open a file on your computer with your text-logging function. The third way, for people without access to either of the above, is e- mail. Send a message to archie@quiche.cs.mcgill.ca. You can leave the subject line blank. Inside the message, type
prog filename
where filename is the file you're looking for. You can ask archie to look up several programs by putting their names on the same "prog" line, like this:
prog file1 file2 file3
Within a few hours, archie will write back with a list of the
appropriate sites.
In all three cases, if there is a system that has your file,
you'll get a response that looks something like this:
Host sumex-aim.stanford.edu