1. What is PLOR?

1.1 What PLOR stand for?

PLOR means Pluto Linux Offline Reader

1.2 What it does?

As the name implies it is a news & mail off-line reader; in particular it reads qwk or soup packet generate by uqwk program (or some other similar packet programs).

Now it is capable to read only soup packet with bugged reply capabilities.

1.3 Where I can find PLOR?

The last version of PLOR can be found on:

ftp://ftp.pluto.linux.it/pub/pluto/devel

with name likes plor-???.tgz, where ??? stands for version number.

There should be a (possibly updated) version also, on sunsite:

ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/system/bbs/mail

1.4 How to compile plor and install

unpack plor.tgz wherever you want:

gzip -d plor.tgz
tar -xvf plor.tar

now you can remove plor.tar;

1. `cd' to the directory containing the package's source code and type `./configure' to configure the package for your system. If you're using `csh' on an old version of System V, you might need to type `sh ./configure' instead to prevent `csh' from trying to execute `configure' itself. Running `configure' takes awhile. While running, it prints some messages telling which features it is checking for.
2. Type `make' to compile the package.
3. Type `make install' to install the programs and any data files and documentation.

There should be no problem in compiling plor; if there are any email us, please!

PLOR was compiled with -ansi -pedantic options of gcc; this should make PLOR some-what portable on other UNIX-like systems.

1.5 How to use plor

Take your soup (or qwk) packet and uncompress it in the plor directory; simply call 'plor' and follow the online instructions.

There won't be difficulties to use plor; if there are some, please let us know what kind of difficulties you found using plor.

Plor support some options:

• -h shows a little help screen
• -p this option is called ``plain output''; it makes plor to produced a plain output, without formatting it, or without adding anything else than the message; the message could then be formatted with a pager like less; this could be useful for someone who decide to make a front-end for plor
• -c n select conference number n
• -m n select message number n
• -s select soup mode
• -q select qwk mode (not yet implemented)

So if you want to see only the first message of the first conference in soup mode, and you want to have a plain output, because you like to have it formatted by less, use:

plor -p -s -c 1 -m 1 | less

1.6 FreeBSD

Yes. Even if PLOR is a Linux Offline Reader, it seems to run also on FreeBSD. Thanks to Tim Vanderhoek <\tthoek@freenet.hamilton.on.ca\ for the port. Refer to him for any FreeBSD related problem with PLOR.