This is the README file for xtoolplaces.

Author:

  Adam Stein (adam@iset.scan.mc.xerox.com)

Copyright:

  Copyright (c) 1995 Xerox Corporation.  All Rights Reserved.

  Permission to use, copy, modify  and  distribute  without  charge
  this  software,  documentation, images, etc. is granted, provided
  that this copyright and the author's name is retained.

  A fee may be charged for this program ONLY to recover  costs  for
  distribution  (i.e.  media costs).  No profit can be made on this
  program.

  The author assumes no responsibility for  disasters  (natural  or
  otherwise) as a consequence of use of this software.

Description:

  This program will perform text pattern subtitution.  It can replace
  text with other text like sed.  It's advantage over sed is it's
  ability to specify a program to run whose output is the replacement
  instead of just text.

  It was written for Perl v4.036.

  Repl is currently at v1.0.

Installation:

  Check the path for perl in the first line of "repl".  This should be
  changed to suite your system's setup.

  Also, the variable MAXLEN is set to the longest output that a command
  can return.  This is used to capture the output when the replacement
  text is the output of an executable program.  If you will have programs
  that will produce longer output messages, change MAXLEN accordingly.

  To install, just copy "repl" to a suitable bin directory and "repl.n"
  to a suitable man directory (i.e. /usr/local/bin and /usr/local/man/mann).

Methodology:

  This program works by following these steps:

  I.   Get filename from command line

  II.  Loop through lines in replacement file:

       a. store the text to replace and the replacement

          1. If the replacement's a command to run, execute
	     the program and save the output

          2. If the replacement's just text, store the text
	     as is
  
  III. Loop through input file and perform substitutions

Bugs/Additions:

  I would appreciate knowing about any bugs either found or
  fixed and any enhancements made.  I would like to keep a
  centralized version with the upgrades so that there aren't
  50 million versions posted to the net.  I can't make any
  guarantees to when bug fixes would be made (if any are
  found :-{), but I'll do my best.

  I hope this program is of use to you, either in it's capacity or as simple
  example in Perl programming.


