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

( 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 !

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 ?
• How do par2/repair by double-clicking from my file manager without opening a console ?
• Is there a par2 GUI ?
• How to batch-repair the millions of files that I have downloaded legally
• How do I extract multiple-part Rar archives with Linux ? ( rar r00 r01 r02, etc )
• How do I create Rar archives with Linux ?
• How to join split files .001 .002 .003 .004… back together ?
• Advice for posting par2 and split files
• Linux newsgrabbers and newsreaders

»

Many thanks to the people on a.b.m.a.d for their help ! ( Anthony, Nobody, etc )

If you have other interesting tips to share about Usenet binaries with Linux, do not hesitate to drop a comment ( no registration required ). Stay tuned, this FAQ is regularly updated.

updated July 2007 : rar and Ben’s Par2GUI

updated September 2009 : new website