RECOVER(6)                 OpenBSD Reference Manual                 RECOVER(6)



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).

       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.  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.

SEE ALSO
       nethack(6)

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.



4th Berkeley Distribution       9 January 1993                      RECOVER(6)
