| Overview | Download | Links | Release History | License | Requirements | Installation | Usage and Examples | Known bugs | Possible things to do | Author and Feedback | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Bestfit is a small program to determine which files that should be put on a CD (or other media), so that as little space as possible is wasted. It is very easy to use: you specify files on the command line, and bestfit prints the names of those that were selected. Alternatively, bestfit can execute a command for each selected file (e.g. to move them to a different directory). This problem is also known as the 0-1 knapsack problem. The algorithm implemented by bestfit solves instances of it optimally in theta(n*W) time, where n is number of files to choose between and W the amount of free space. This may sound bad but since W is number of blocks and not bytes, this algorithm is not that inefficient. Try it yourself and see. Due to the nature of this algorithm, bestfit uses a lot of memory - approximately 1.5M per file specified on command line. As long as you have enough swap space, this is usually not a problem since bestfit doesn't use all at the same time. Bestfit does (at this time) not use any external program such as mkisofs or mkhybrid to calculate the size of files. Instead the file and directory sizes and rounded up towards the nearest 2048-byte multiple and added together. (2048 bytes is the block size on ISO images.) Bestfit can not account for all oddities with ISO images (for instance, there are multiple path tables, padding, etc which is not easy to calculate), therefore exact results can not always be produced. Bestfit may waste more space than necessary, or even tell you that files that won't fit actually fits. (I consider the latter to be a bug though. If you encounter it, please mail me.) In other words, manually selecting files and checking that they fit using mkisofs may in some cases give you better results than using bestfit. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
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The latest version is 0.2.0 which was released on 2001-10-01.
The previous version is 0.1.0 which was released on 2001-04-23.
There is also an APT repository for the Debian package of bestfit. To use it, place the following line in your /etc/apt/sources.list file and run apt-get update: deb http://www.student.lu.se/~nbi98oli/ unstable main | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Freshmeat record Free Software Directory record | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Bestfit is copyright (C) 2001 Oskar Liljeblad This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it 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. This program is distributed in the hope that it 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. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
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• GNU libc 2.0 or later Bestfit uses some GNU extensions of libc (such as getopt_long). | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Compile bestfit by running `configure' and then `make'. This should produce an executable `bestfit' in the src directory, which can be used right away. If you would like to install bestfit on your system, run `make install'. This will copy the executable and the man page `bestfit.1' into the appropriate directories (usually /usr/local/bin and /usr/local/share/man/man1, respecively). For further details regarding configure and the make directives, see the INSTALL file. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Run `bestfit --help' to display a list of options, or see the man page (`man ./docs/bestfit.1'). The man page also contains some examples on how to use bestfit. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| None at the moment. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| See the TODO file. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
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The author of bestfit and this document, Oskar Liljeblad, can be reached via email address oskar@osk.mine.nu Please send bug reports, suggestions, ideas or comments in general to me. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||