README

4 February 2001
Revised 7 April 2013

I wrote this program (dbfsak) because of the fact that Midnight Commander
uses a program called dbview, which doesn't work. Looking over the
docs/source for dbview, it appears it was written long ago, abandoned, and
then someone resurrected it with little or no modification. When I've tried
to run it, it often hasn't worked. I needed something to display FoxPro
data files, so I wrote this little program. Now, I just do a symlink from
dbview to dbfdump (I made the command lines similar), and off I go.

I'll leave it to the man page to tell you how to run it.

Compilation and installation are the usual:

make ; make install

Installation is in the /usr/local tree. If you don't like this, edit the
makefile.

There are no extraordinary dependencies with this program. It is written
in C and relies only on gcc and the standard C libraries. It was originally
written in C, ported to C++ and then ported back to C again. I'm not a big
fan of C++ and I didn't want to have to maintain it in C++.

This was a quicky program. The code is not beautiful. Like most Open Source
programs, I've added features to it over the years as I've needed them. If
you have suggestions for improvement or bug reports, feel free. If you'd
like to contribute code, let me know.

I cannot claim perfection in this program. It may well have bugs. As such,
I make no claims about the suitability of these programs for your
application, and cannot assume responsibility for your use of them, or the
results thereof.

Naturally, this program is released under an Open Source license. Do with
it as you will, but give me credit for the original work, if you please.

Paul M. Foster