Ubuntu Manpage: recover - recover a NetHack game interrupted by disaster

Provided by: nethack-common_3.6.7-1_amd64

NAME

       recover - recover a NetHack game interrupted by disaster

SYNOPSIS

       recover [ -d directory ] base1 base2 ...

DESCRIPTION

Occasionally, a NetHack game will be interrupted by disaster when the game or the system
crashes. Prior to NetHack v3.1, these games were lost because various information like
the player's inventory was kept only in memory. Now, all pertinent information can be
written out to disk, so such games can be recovered at the point of the last level change.

The base options tell recover which files to process. Each base option specifies recovery
of a separate game.

The -d option, which must be the first argument if it appears, supplies a directory which
is the NetHack playground. It overrides the value from NETHACKDIR, HACKDIR, or the
directory specified by the game administrator during compilation (usually
/usr/games/lib/nethackdir).

^?ALLDOCS For recovery to be possible, nethack must have been compiled with the INSURANCE
option, and the run-time option checkpoint must also have been on. ^: ^?INSURANCE For
recovery to be possible, nethack must have been compiled with the INSURANCE option (this
configuration was), and the run-time option checkpoint must also have been on. ^: This
configuration of nethack was created without support for recovery. ^. ^. NetHack
normally writes out files for levels as the player leaves them, so they will be ready for
return visits. When checkpointing, NetHack also writes out the level entered and the
current game state on every level change. This naturally slows level changes down
somewhat.

The level file names are of the form base.nn, where nn is an internal bookkeeping number
for the level. The file base.0 is used for game identity, locking, and, when
checkpointing, for the game state. Various OSes use different strategies for constructing
the base name. Microcomputers use the character name, possibly truncated and modified to
be a legal filename on that system. Multi-user systems use the (modified) character name
prefixed by a user number to avoid conflicts, or "xlock" if the number of concurrent
players is being limited. It may be necessary to look in the playground to find the
correct base name of the interrupted game. recover will transform these level files into
a save file of the same name as nethack would have used.

Since recover must be able to read and delete files from the playground and create files
in the save directory, it has interesting interactions with game security. Giving
ordinary players access to recover through setuid or setgid is tantamount to leaving the
playground world-writable, with respect to both cheating and messing up other players.
For a single-user system, this of course does not change anything, so some of the
microcomputer ports install recover by default.

For a multi-user system, the game administrator may want to arrange for all .0 files in
the playground to be fed to recover when the host machine boots, and handle game crashes
individually. If the user population is sufficiently trustworthy, recover can be
installed with the same permissions the nethack executable has. In either case, recover
is easily compiled from the distribution utility directory.

NOTES

       Like  nethack  itself,  recover  will  overwrite  existing  savefiles  of  the  same name.
       Savefiles created by recover are  uncompressed;  they  may  be  compressed  afterwards  if
       desired, but even a compression-using nethack will find them in the uncompressed form.

BUGS

       recover  makes  no  attempt  to  find out if a base name specifies a game in progress.  If
       multiple machines share a playground, this would be impossible to determine.

       recover should be taught  to  use  the  nethack  playground  locking  mechanism  to  avoid
       conflicts.

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