Unlike Archie Shase enables you to search by file descriptions, dates and sizes, in addition to file names. Shase is thus only available for managed software archives like Cica, Simtel, Hobbes OS/2 archive ...

Contents:

1. What's new?
2. Search the library .
3. Library front desk
4. On shareware and Internet software archives for dummies
5. How it works.
6. Information for archive maintainers.
7. Information for webmasters and hotlist editors.
8. We need your help !
9. Acknowledgements.
10. Copyright.

• User interface.
• Archive statistics information.
• Archive definition files. Removed the hard-coding from the script.
• Created index files, archive definition files and archive statistics files in one directory.
• Database part of Shase is ready for mirroring.

• Help on form fields.
• Dates and sizes should be a part of all existing indexes.
• Add support for CUG, graphics and sound files. Help needed.

Most of the free shareware on the Interent is stored in a dozen or two software archives - computers or "sites", where all the authors would send their work. The archive manager there looks at a program, writes a short description, stores it into the right directory - in short - manages the archive. People would than download (copy) files from the site.

A site storing a few thousand programs might get very busy, it would get too slow, so a few other sites on the net start mirroring that archive. They would maintain an exact copy of the archive on some other site which would take some load of the original one.

Shase lets you search the contents of the worlds most popular archives by keywords and file descriptions and then download the found files from any of the archive's mirrors. Shase 1.3 knew about some 58000 free programs.

How it works

The demon mirrors indexes which describe files in an archive to a computer at Civil Engineering Department of the Ljubljana University in Slovenia and translates the indexes into a common neutral format . The demon runs each morning.

The part which you see is a script that can:

• display the Form,
• do the search on file description and
• display the results in such a way that you can use them to download the file.

What Shase does not do is verify if the given file actually is available on each of the mirror sites or check if the mirror site will let you attach at that moment. If in trouble, try another one. If always in trouble, please report the problem.

A note to archive maintainers

Shase depends on the format of your index files. PLEASE DO NOT CHANGE IT or at least let me know!

Proposed format of the archive meta information

1. Index of files in the archive in a unified format.
2. Meta information about the archive.

• Lines contain tab separated record of:
  • path/filename (relative to archive root directory. Directories have trailing slash)
  • date (in YYMMDD format)
  • size (in bytes)
  • file description (from 30 to 1000 bytes)
• Lines should be sorted by date. Newest files on top.

games/faq/tetris.faq	940531	2342	FAQ for teris style games
...

%ID:            garbo
%Name:          Garbo PC Archive
%Description:   Well managed archive of PC software
                originally from University of Wasa, Finland. 
%Source:        ftp://garbo.uwasa.fi/pc
%Sites:
        ftp://garbo.uwasa.fi/pc
        ftp://archie.au/micros/pc/garbo
        ftp://ftp.germany.eu.net/pub/comp/msdos/mirror.garbo
        ftp://ftp.mpd.co.za/pub/garbo
        ftp://cnuce_arch.cnr.it/pub/msdos/garbo.uwasa.fi
        ftp://Owl.und.ac.za/Sites/garbo/pc

        ftp://NCTUCCCA.edu.tw/PC/garbo
        ftp://wuarchive.wustl.edu/systems/msdos/garbo.uwasa.fi
        ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/pub/garbo/pc
        ftp://cnuce-arch.cnr.it/pub/msdos/garbo.uwasa.fi

When your archive is described in such a way, please tell the VSL manager ziga.turk@fagg.uni-lj.si about it.

A note to webmasters and hotlist editors