Alt.bin – alt.binaries – usenet newsgroups – reference and tutorials

My binary poetry : twitter.com/usenetbinaries

You can use this perl script.

$ mass-par2repair alt.binaries.*

Where arguments are directories, NOT files.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

# Copyright (C) 2005 Anthony DeRobertis (netnews at derobert d0t net)

#

# This file is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify

# it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by

# the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or

# (at your option) any later version.

# This file is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,

# but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of

# MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the

# GNU General Public License for more details.

# You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License

# along with this file; if not, write to the Free Software

# Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA

sub run_par(@);

my %results = ();

foreach my $dir (@ARGV) {

opendir DH, $dir or die “Could not open directory $dir: $!”;

my %par_files = ();

my %segment_files = ();

foreach my $file (readdir DH) {

my $base = undef;

if ($file =~ /.par2?$/i) {

if ($file =~ /^(.+)\.vol\d+\+\d+\.par2?$/i) {

$base = $1;

} elsif ($file =~ /^(.+)\.par2?/i) {

$base = $1;

} else {

die “Failed to find basename of $file.”;

}

push @{$par_files{$base}}, $file;

} elsif ($file =~ /^(.+)\.\d\d\d$/) {

$base = $1;

push @{$segment_files{$base}}, $file;

}

}

foreach my $key (keys %par_files) {

print “$key:\n “;

print join(“\n “, @{$par_files{$key}}), “\n”;

my @args = ();

foreach my $file (@{$par_files{$key}}, @{$segment_files{$key}}) {

push @args, “$dir/$file”;

}

my $retcode = run_par(@args);

if ($retcode == -1) {

die “Could not exec par2: $!”;

} elsif ($retcode == 0) {

#$results{$dir}->{$key} = ‘OK’;

print ” OK.\n\n”

} else {

$results{$dir}->{$key} = “FAILED ($retcode).”;

print ” FAILED ($retcode)\n\n”;

}

}

closedir DH;

}

print “\n\n\n”;

foreach my $dir (keys %results) {

print “SUMMARY FOR $dir:\n”;

foreach my $file (sort keys %{$results{$dir}}) {

print “\t$file: ” . $results{$dir}->{$file} . “\n”;

}

print “\n”;

}

sub run_par(@) {

my $pid = fork();

if ($pid == -1) {

return -1;

} elsif ($pid == 0) {

open STDOUT, ‘+>’, ‘/dev/null’ or die “> /dev/null failed: $!”;

exec {‘par2′} ‘par2′, ‘r’, ‘–’, @_;

die “Exec of par2 failed: $!”;

} else {

waitpid($pid, 0);

return $?;

}

}

########END OF PERL SCRIPT #############

As you noticed, I’ve messed up all the formatting but it still works. If you want the original file, contact the author, his address is in the headers.

So, to batch-repair everything in a directory you can also simply type :

for i in *.par2; do par2repair $i; done

This will work 99% of the time, since usually the first par2 file of the a set ( the smallest one ) is not capitalized, whereas the rest if them are.

To make it work 100% of the time, you can do this :

for i in *.[pP][aA][rR]2; do par2 r $i; done

But beware, this is a brutal, it will run par2repair everytime for every par2 file in the recovery set.

( thanks to the anonymous poster )

Please drop a comment if you have a question or new software to plug !

( Thanks a lot to “Nobody” @ a.b.m.a.d for this part! )

You don’t need a file splitter do it, the split command-line will do the job easily.

Posting rules :

* The split files must be a multiple of the par2 block-size, if not some blocks can be lost between two split files.

* The par2 block-size should be equal to the size of the article, or a multiple of it.

* Posting with Newspost constrains the article size to be a multiple of 45, and thus, so must be the Par2 block-size and the split file size.

Here’s an example of good settings :

# Par2 block-size : 225,000 bytes

# Article size : 225,000 bytes and 5000 lines

# Split files size : 9,000,000 bytes ( 40 articles )

#!/bin/sh

par2 create -s225000 $1

split –suffix-length=3 –numeric-suffixes –bytes=9000000 $1 $1′.’

Example of use :

$ sh parsplit.sh uberspanking.avi

To join the files back together and check them at the same time :

par2 r myfile.avi.par2 myfile.avi*

To post with Newspost, don’t forget to specify the good number of lines :

$ newspost …….. -l 5000 ……

Here’s another binary poster : yencee.

Please drop a comment if you have a question or new software to plug !

Which binaries grabber for Linux ?

* Multi-server, multi-sources :

1. Pan 0.1** beta now uses less memory, handles multiple servers and nzb files. It only allows 4 connections per server though, which is kind of bad for those of us who pay for using more. I wish it could support SSL and nntps as well.

2. Klibido : GNU, handles Nzb files, OK but unstable

3. BNR2 : heavy, unstable, coded with Kylix, ( not free? )

4. Newsbin Pro is also reported to work fine with Wine and seem to use very few memory. ( not free )

* Nzb command-lines : nzb, hellanzb, NZBget, nzbperl, Knzb.

* Command-line binary grabbers : ubh, brag, aub, nget,

How do I extract multiple-part Rar archives with Linux ? ( rar r00 r01 r02, etc )

With the unrar command line. Unrar is open source ( exotic licence). Notice that once unrar is installed, front-ends like File-roller, Ark, Xarchiver, or Gnome and Xfce right click’s “Extract here” can extract Rar archives automatically.

$ unrar e file.rar

Do not install the “GNU unrar” it will not work on Rar3 files, use the unrar-nonfree ( Debian/Ubuntu ) , unrar from plf ( Mandriva ) packages, or the files from the author’s website ( rarlab ).   (  is this still true ? )

How do I create Rar archives with Linux ? ( thanks to Ohmster for this part )

The Rar command-line is the only way to do it. It costs about 30$ at rarlab.com. Like you probably already know, it is at the moment the de-facto standard for posting binaries.

example of use :

rar a -s -v15m ppv-erica_campbell-672 *.* ( LOL!!! )

This will create 15Mb volumes from the content of the current directory.
The file mask “*.*” will include all files ( including par2, nzb, nfo, screenshot, video sample, etc ) in the

To create a rar archive file that is broken into specified size parts, use this syntax:

rar a -v15000k hotstuff *

What this does:

• rar to run the rar program.
• “a” to command “Add to archive”. If the archive does not exist, it will be created.
• -v15000k is the switch to tell rar to create archive parts no larger than 15,000Kb or 15Mb.
• hotstuff is the name of the archive you wish to create.
• * will tell the rar program to include all files in the current directory.

If you’re not willing to pay 30$, consider splitting the file in chunks instead since it’s the second most common way to post usenet binaries these days and it a totally accepted usage.

Please drop a comment if you have a question or new software to plug !

Concatenation of multiple split files.

These split files are likely to be made by Quickpar users under windows, so the perfect way to assemble them is to use the par2 command line. ( from the parchive package )

par2 r myfile.par2 myfile.*

That way, all the split files will be considered as additionnal blocks, and it will check, repair, concatenate the files at the same time.

Note that it’s also possible to join the split files back together and then use the new file to find additionnal blocks. It takes one step more but it can save some processing time.

Sometimes the posters mistakenly create parity files that will repair the split files instead of the actual file, after repairing the split files use one of these sweet shell wildcard to merge them back together :

$ cat *.[0-9][0-9][0-9] >output.avi

If the split files are not the only ones in the folder :

$ cat yourfile.avi.[0-9][0-9][0-9] >yourfile.avi

or :

$ cat yourfile.avi.??? >yourfile.avi

This is very rare but sometimes .001 .002 .003 files are not split files but actual Rar multiple-part archives, in that case, unrar should do the job :

$ unrar e yourfile.avi.001

This only happened to me once in millions of Gigas of legal usenet binaries downloads hehe.

Please drop a comment if you have a question or new software to plug !

How do I repair incomplete files with the par2 parity files ?

With the parchive package ( or par2 package if you use Debian/Ubuntu )and the par2 command :

$ par2 r file.par2

or :

$ par2repair file.par2

Or with Quickpar that works fine with Wine.

How do par2/repair by double-clicking from my file manager without opening a console ? Is there a par2 GUI ?

Those using KDE/Konqueror won’t have any problem associating par2 files with par2repair and letting the console open after the operation, it’s very straight forward.
With Gnome opening a gnome-terminal from Nautilus is tricky since it the window closes too quickly you can’t see what happened, so let’s use xterm instead :

In Nautilus, associate par2 extensions with custom command-line :

xterm -hold -e par2repair

About the Par2 GUIs there are several :

• Ben’s Par2GUI KDE script, which judging by the comments is very handy.
• Gpar2
• PyPar2

Please drop a comment if you have a question or new software to plug !

Do NOT use newsguy.com, it’s a scam. You can’t cancel at any time, there’s nothing in the interface to cancel and they will not answer your messages.

Avoid this company.

Links :
Par2GUI
Gpar2
PyPar2

Thanks for the good work guys, but here’s a request :

If I have a set of split file like those :

myfile.avi.par2
myfile.avi.vol00+1.PAR2
myfile.avi.vol01+2.PAR2
myfile.avi.001
myfile.avi.002
myfile.avi.003
myfile.avi.004

When we click on any par2 file, your front-end should be able to find the split files as additional blocks ( par2 r myfile.avi.par2 myfile.avi.* ) and join them back together, that’s how they do it with Quickpar and Windows.

Check out the usenet binaries tutorial for more references.

Thanks in advance guys.

Wow, if I break my Samsung E720 cellphone, I hope they will document this baby :

“CMOS Camera Module – 640×480

Price: $19.95

This is a 640×480 pixel resolution CMOS camera used in the Samsung E700 cellular phone. While 0.3 mega pixels may not sound like a lot, this module is one of the smallest, lowest cost CMOS imaging modules currently available to the embedded market.
(…)

Therefore – we will be offering a $200 in-store gift certificate to the first customer who can adequately document and report their successful single-image capture using this module. We would be thrilled to post your mug and forever immortalize you on the SFE site (well, for a day or two anyway). We will be working to reverse engineer the unit and encourage all customers to work together through the SFE support forum.”

LINK