7ac64532a9
Update the man pages and generated text copies for nethack and recover. I haven't looked at the other four (dlb, makedefs, dgn_comp, lev_comp). recover's page referred to INSURANCE as being conditional, which is no longer the case. nethack's page was missing a bunch of files to be found in the playground and also a couple of environment variables. I haven't read through the text of the page to try to see whether other updates are warranted. The generated text is wider than the previous copy (one or two space right margin instead of 5 or so). I just used 'make nethack.txt' and 'make recover.txt' so don't know why that changed. (The older, wider margin looks better, so if anyone knows how to fix this, please do. And there's got to be a better way to force a blank line inside a table than my <space><tab> hack.)
82 lines
4.0 KiB
Plaintext
82 lines
4.0 KiB
Plaintext
RECOVER(6) RECOVER(6)
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NAME
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recover - recover a NetHack game interrupted by disaster
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SYNOPSIS
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recover [ -d directory ] base1 base2 ...
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DESCRIPTION
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Occasionally, a NetHack game will be interrupted by disaster when the
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game or the system crashes. Prior to NetHack v3.1, these games were
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lost because various information like the player's inventory was kept
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only in memory. Now, all pertinent information can be written out to
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disk, so such games can be recovered at the point of the last level
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change.
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The base options tell recover which files to process. Each base option
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specifies recovery of a separate game.
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The -d option, which must be the first argument if it appears, supplies
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a directory which is the NetHack playground. It overrides the value
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from NETHACKDIR, HACKDIR, or the directory specified by the game admin-
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istrator during compilation (usually /usr/games/lib/nethackdir).
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For recovery to be possible, the run-time option checkpoint must have
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been on.
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NetHack normally writes out files for levels as the player leaves them,
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so they will be ready for return visits. When checkpointing, NetHack
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also writes out the level entered and the current game state on every
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level change. This naturally slows level changes down somewhat.
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The level file names are of the form base.nn, where nn is an internal
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bookkeeping number for the level. The file base.0 is used for game
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identity, locking, and, when checkpointing, for the game state. Vari-
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ous OSes use different strategies for constructing the base name.
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Microcomputers use the character name, possibly truncated and modified
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to be a legal filename on that system. Multi-user systems use the
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(modified) character name prefixed by a user number to avoid conflicts,
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or "xlock" if the number of concurrent players is being limited. It
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may be necessary to look in the playground to find the correct base
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name of the interrupted game. recover will transform these level files
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into a save file of the same name as nethack would have used.
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Since recover must be able to read and delete files from the playground
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and create files in the save directory, it has interesting interactions
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with game security. Giving ordinary players access to recover through
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setuid or setgid is tantamount to leaving the playground world-
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writable, with respect to both cheating and messing up other players.
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For a single-user system, this of course does not change anything, so
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some of the microcomputer ports install recover by default.
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For a multi-user system, the game administrator may want to arrange for
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all .0 files in the playground to be fed to recover when the host
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machine boots, and handle game crashes individually. If the user popu-
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lation is sufficiently trustworthy, recover can be installed with the
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same permissions the nethack executable has. In either case, recover
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is easily compiled from the distribution utility directory.
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NOTES
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Like nethack itself, recover will overwrite existing savefiles of the
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same name. Savefiles created by recover are uncompressed; they may be
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compressed afterwards if desired, but even a compression-using nethack
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will find them in the uncompressed form.
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SEE ALSO
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nethack(6)
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BUGS
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recover makes no attempt to find out if a base name specifies a game in
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progress. If multiple machines share a playground, this would be
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impossible to determine.
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recover should be taught to use the nethack playground locking mecha-
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nism to avoid conflicts.
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4th Berkeley Distribution 7 December 2015 RECOVER(6)
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