gbutils -- Utilities Overview 

Giulio Bottazzi (bottazzi@sssup.it), September 2015

gbutils is a set of command line utilities for the manipulation and
statistical analysis of data. Data fare usually read from standard
input in ASCII format and results are printed in ASCII format to
standard output.

These utilities are completely written in C. They have been tested
(and used many many times) on different Linux distributions and should
compile and run, in principle, on any Unix platform. No other OSes
have been tested.

Please notice that these programs have been written for personal use,
and are distributed under the GPL license (see the file "COPYING") in
the hope they could be of help to other people, but without any
implied warranty.

Please report bugs to <gbutils@googlegroups.com>. The package home
page is http://cafim.sssup.it/~giulio/software/gbutils/index.html

The most up-to-date information and documentation about the gbutils
package can be found in its home page. A few documents are however
distributed with the package. 

For Linux installation instruction and a brief introduction to the
library, see "intro". More technical details are provided in
"overview". The document "cygwin_install" describes how to install the
package on Windows machines, using the cygwin emulation framework. The
file 'gbget' is a brief tutorial on using the eponymous program, a
sort of Swiss knife for the manipulation of data file, which is often
essential for an effective usage of the utilities in the package.

These documents are distributed in ASCII (.txt extension) and PDF
format.

The package has several dependencies, see the online documentation or
'intro" for further information.

Installation instruction
========================

I recommend to install directly the binary packages from the debian or
Ubuntu repositories. See the online documentation or the file
"intro". In the case this is not possible, the installation from
source should be rather straightforward. Download the package and
unpack it

    tar xvzf gbutils-{version}.tar.gz

move inside the source directory

    cd gbutils-{version}

run the configure script

    ./configure

then build the files

    make

become root

    su

and install them

    make install

If you can't install the file as root you have to provide a different
directory for the binaries using the option ~--prefix~ of the
configure script. See "INSTALL" for details.

For more detailed instructions see the "INSTALL" file in the
distributed package.
