NAME novi sample usage DESCRIPTION Sample scenarios for using novi EXAMPLES Example: show the latest RPMs in a single directory You have a directory with the all of the RPMs for a given release. (That is, orignal RPMs plus the updates.) You want to see what's the latest version of each product therein. $ novi -a list /some/dir/RPMS The output isn't much to look at. That will change in the future. The "list" option started off as a debugging tool. Since "list" is the default action, you could shorten this commandline to: $ novi /some/dir/RPMS The program already looks for files of the pattern "*.rpm" so you don't have to specify this on the commandline. Note that the search for RPM files is NOT recursive; the files must exist just beneath the specified directory. Example: show the latest RPMs in a set of directories Your RPMs are separated into different directories -- OS, updates, third-party, and so on. You want to see the latest version of each product. $ novi /dir1/RPMS /dir2/RPMS /dir3/RPMS [...] /dirN/RPMS There's no hard limit on the number of RPMs novi can handle. The only limit should be your system's available memory for the objects, and any upper limits on your C++ implementation's STL containers. Example: hardlink the latest RPMs to another directory You want to find the latest-version RPMs in a series of directories, and hard-link them to another location (e.g. the base of a new Kickstart tree). $ novi -a hardlink -t /target/dir /dir1/RPMS [...] /dirN/RPMS As a reminder, the hard-link only works if all of these directories are on the same filesystem. Example: copy the latest RPMs to another directory This feature isn't yet implemented. Expect it in an upcoming release, if enough people really ask for it. Given the significant I/O activity, though, would you really want to copy the RPMs to the target directory? (A single Fedora release can have a couple of gigabytes in RPMs.) By comparison, a hard-link isn't quite so I/O-intensive: it just requires another file pointer in the inode table, which doesn't require reading/writing the file itself. AUTHOR Ethan McCallum WEBSITE http://www.ExMachinaTech.net/ (still under construction) LIMITATIONS refer to the novi(1) manpage SEE ALSO novi(1) BUGS refer to the novi(1) manpage, and/or the novi website at http://www.ExMachinaTech.net/