Copyright (C) 1995-2020 Jonathan Hogg [email protected]

This program 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 program 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 program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA

usepackage is an environment management program. It is based on the principle of "packages" that are "used". When a package is used, the information necessary to invoke it is drawn into the environment of the shell. A summary of how to setup and use the system is given below; see the manual page for more information.

Add one of the following lines to your shell rc file (modify depending on where you installed usepackage):

• for csh/tcsh: source /usr/local/share/usepackage/use.csh
• for sh/zsh/bash: source /usr/local/share/usepackage/use.bsh
• for ksh: . /usr/local/share/usepackage/use.ksh

Then invoke use to add packages to your environment like:

use <package1> [<package2>...]

For example, in the shell rc file:

use gnu standard X11

Note that usepackage is case-insensitive, so x11 is also acceptable in the above example.

The use command can be called at any time to use another package, for example:

% latex foo
latex: Command not found.
% use tex
% latex foo
This is TeX, Version 3.1415 (C version 6.1)
...

If the requested package is not available for your platform then a warning message will be given of the form:

% use java
usepackage: no match for package `java' on this host.

These messages can be suppressed with the -s flag (for instance if you log onto platforms for which certain packages that you use are not available):

% use -s java

You can obtain a usage summary by typing use with no arguments and a list of available packages with:

% use -l

usepackage 1.14, Copyright (C) 1995-2020  Jonathan Hogg

Available packages are:

  none - empty paths
  dot - add current directory to PATH (possible security hole)
  [...]

As usepackage makes it very easy to add packages into your environment at the command line, it is worth not adding all the packages you might ever need in your shell rc file. Instead add only the packages you commonly use and add rarer ones before you run them. For example, if you rarely use latex it makes no sense to keep it resident in your path, following the example above it is simple to bring it in before you use it. This will keep your path short and speed-up shell startup times. In particular, some brain-dead shells have major problems with a very long path. Another advantage of doing this is that the man command works much better with a short MANPATH variable and even better if the pages you request are near the head of the MANPATH (which is the case when a package is added at the command line).

The file usepackage.conf contains the information about each package. This file contains comments explaining its format. Per-user packages can be added by creating the file .packages in your home directory with the same format as the main packages file (assuming the include line in usepackage.conf is kept). The syntax is also documented in the usepackage manual page.

If you find a bug in usepackage, please let me know about it. Best place to do so is on GitHub:

https://github.com/jonathanhogg/usepackage