tmaterna.com

packit

Download packit

packit is technically not a program. It is a perl script. You can find more information on installing perl free on your computer from ActiveState.

The documentation reproduced below is extracted directly from the in-line help by pod2html.




NAME

packit.pl - chooses files to pack to avoid wasting space on cd,dvd,...


SYNOPSIS

packit.pl [options] [directory]

packit.pl [options] file/directory file/directory ...


ARGUMENTS

[directory]

The directory in which the files to pack are. If omitted, the current directory is used. The subdirectories are considered as un breakable blocks. To make sure a group of files will be on the same medium, place them in a subdirectory (ex: MyBook-Tome1.pdf, MyBook-Tome2.pdf,...)

file/directory

If more than 1 argument is passed, each one is assumed to be a file or a directory (considered 1 piece) to pack.


OPTIONS

-h or --help

Produces full documentation.

-m size or --medium-size size

Sets the size of the medium to fill. packit will try to reach this target size without overshooting. The default is the size of a dvd. The format supports the usage of units (run packit -u to see a list of supported units). If no unit is specified, bytes is assumed.

ex: 700Mb, dvd, floppy, 3Gb, 12345

-q or --quiet

Reduces the programs output.

-t size or --tolerance size

The tolerance on the result. For the possible formats of size, see --medium-size size. The tolerance is set by default to 0.01% of the medium-size.

For example, if you have a lot of files, the program can take a very long time to test all the possible solutions. When the solution is close enough, it's is not worth waiting a long time just to improve by a few bytes. So you can set the tolerance to e.g. 10Kb, if you think that a solution within 10Kb is good enough.

-u or --units

Display the list of supported units and exit.

-v or --verbose

Prints more information about the set of files we start with.


EXAMPLES

packit -t 25kb -m dvd

Will try to group some files or directories from the current directory so as to fill a dvd with as little as possible space left on the dvd. The program will stop and display the solution as soon as it finds one leaving less than 25 kilobytes free on the dvd.


BUGS

Could in principle get into trouble if the number of files is very large since the program uses recurrence. I never had that happening in practice yet. Try increasing the tolerance if it does.


COPYRIGHT

Copyright Thomas Materna <tmaterna@tmaterna.com> (http://www.tmaterna.com)

Use and redistribution is allowed provided that this copyright and disclaimer is reproduced.

This code is provided ``as is'', without ANY express or implied warranties. In no event should the author be liable for any consequence of any type of use of this software.


AUTHORS

Thomas Materna <tmaterna@tmaterna.com> (http://www.tmaterna.com)


README

packit.pl helps saving space when burning CDs, DVDs,... It computes which files/directories to burn on a medium in order to make the unused space on the medium as little as possible. The current best solution is displayed in real time (unless --quiet is used), the user can stop the program at any time when satisfied by hitting Ctrl-C. The program will then display the detail of the best solution and exit.


PREREQUISITES

strict, Pod::Usage for the documentation, Getopt::Long for the comman line parsing, File::Find to compute a directory's size


OSNAMES

any


SCRIPT CATEGORIES

CPAN Win32/Utilities