davidy@sumax.seattleu.edu (David L. Yee) (01/21/91)
Help! I heard the recommendations for the PBM utility package. Thus, I dutifully downloaded it from ab20, and decompressed it. The trouble is, I can't figure out how to make them, giftoppm to be specific, work. I try: giftoppm F18.gif F18.ppm and it opens a file called F18.ppm but does not seem to write anything to it. Instead the output goes to the screen instead. The docs seemed to me very terse, to say the least, and there was hardly anything mentioning the Amiga in them. I am not very familiar with Unix style programs or commands- so I hope those of you who are successfully using this package can help me. Please! Thanks in advance, David L. Yee Email to:davidy@sumax.seattleu.edu P.S. the news reader here is somewhat unreliable. I tried posting this question before but I don't think it made it out- apologies if you have been forced to read it twice. If you can do so, please send Email- it is the only way I can be sure of getting your answer. If by chance anyone else needs to know how to use this, I shall be happy to post a summary. Thanks again.
davidy@sumax.seattleu.edu (David L. Yee) (01/22/91)
In article <2160@sumax.seattleu.edu> davidy@sumax.seattleu.edu (David L. Yee) writes: > > Help! I heard the recommendations for the PBM utility package. Thus, >I dutifully downloaded it from ab20, and decompressed it. The trouble is, >I can't figure out how to make them, giftoppm to be specific, work. I try: > > giftoppm F18.gif F18.ppm > >and it opens a file called F18.ppm but does not seem to write anything to it. >Instead the output goes to the screen instead. The docs seemed to me very >terse, to say the least, and there was hardly anything mentioning the Amiga >in them. I am not very familiar with Unix style programs or commands- so I >hope those of you who are successfully using this package can help me. Please! > Thanks very much for all of you who sent your kind replies. The problem I had was I was using the redirection operators wrongly. I was doing: giftoppm F18.gif >F18.ppm when the true form should be (for the Amiga) giftoppm >F18.ppm F18.gif and this threw me for a loop. But I have tried it out using the proper form (for the Amiga) and it works fine, and I am told all the PBM commands work in the same way. The only thing I can say is that I didn't see any mention of this stuff in the docs, but what do I care, now that it works! Apparantly the Amiga (shell? DOS?) requires that the redirection operator be placed in the second position (first argument) as shown in the form above. Well, many thanks to you all, I got so many helpful replies in so short a time. (P.S. if you are a novice to the PBM utilities as am I, you ought to have a hard disk and 3+ megs RAM when using giftoppm... I imagine the same applies to many of the commands in the PBM pckage.) David L. Yee Email to:davidy@sumax.seattleu.edu