Perl tools

The perl tools are some self-explanatory perl scripts that e.g. draw paper tapes (ASCII art), generate labels in different "fonts", parse ASCII number files, etc.

They only require a perl compiler but nothing more -- no exotic CPAN modules, etc. -- so they'll run on almost every platform.

The files in detail

This is an overview over the perl tools:

• byte-tester: Will simply output a byte with the value you gave the program via argv[1]. Nice for sending special bytes via shell scripts to the puncher
• hex-meter: Generates a quite long byte pattern that contains all possible byte values from 0x00 up to 0xFF. Nice for debugging and espacially practical for counting rapidly the position on another paper tape.
• how-long-is-this-papertape: This is a kind of du shell utility for paper tapes – it won't count the size some files take on your hard disk but the length of paper tape they would produce if punched out ;-)
• label-it: A very simple implementation of a paper tape font: You input the label via command line arguments and this script will produce some bytes that will look like text when punched out on a paper tape ;-)
  This was the very first implementation of a paper tape font.
• punch-simulator: A very simple program to print out how bytes (reading from STDIN) would look on a paper tape. ASCII art :-)
• read-file: This is a simple program that reads in numbers from a text file and packs them together to bytes. So this behaves a bit like byte-tester, only more complex.
• strip-null-bytes (C program): This is a quite simple program that strips all null bytes at the start and end of a file/stdin and outputs that to stdout. Since that s a quite low-level task, it's implemented in C.
• udo-parser 0, udo-parser 1: Some simple Perl ASCII file parsers that generate byte data to stdout.

Copyright for the complete directory

Copyright 2008 Sven Köppel, all tools in this directory are released under the GPL.

The Paper Tape Project Perl Tools are free software: you can redistribute them and/or modify them under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

Programs from the Paper Tape Project are distributed in the hope that they will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

For a copy of the GNU General Public License, see .