HATCH(1)

NAME
hatch - a tool for hatching files into Fidonet file areas

SYNOPSIS
hatch [ -d description ] -a area -f file

DESCRIPTION
hatch hatches a file into fidonet file areas. This is the way files (binaries an text files) are distributed over the fidonet.

hatch is designed to work well together with ifcico by Eugene G. Crosser and fidogate by Martin Junius. About other constallation I can't say anything. You'll have to try.

hatch copies the given file into the fidonet outbound directory, generates a tic file for it and makes an entry in the spool file.

To generate this specific tic file hatch has to retrieve some information such as the bossnode for the specific file area, the name of the bossnode's sysop and a password that has to be used.

In the file areas file the tool looks for the bossnode and the name of the bossnode's sysop. The format is very simple. The file contains of three fields, separated with at least one space or tab character.

In fidogate's alias file hatch looks to find out our point number.

The password is taken from ifcico's password file. The tool looks out for the keyword `password'.

FILES
The file names may be changed at compilation time or by the configuration file, so these are only approximations.

/usr/local/lib/fidonet/fileareas - file areas file
/usr/local/lib/fidonet/aliases - alias file
/usr/local/lib/fidonet/passwds - ifcico passwds file
/var/spool/fidonet/outb - fidonet outbound directory

AUTHOR
Martin Schulze <mgs@infodrom.north.de>