You can download the most current source distribution of rudiments from http://www.firstworks.com/site/downloads/archive/rudiments-latest.tar.gz.

To unpack the distribution, copy the file to a location on your machine that you have access to and execute the following commands:

• gunzip rudiments-latest.tar.gz
• tar xf rudiments-latest.tar

This will create a rudiments-X.X directory with include, lib and src directories beneath it.

To compile Rudiments, read the INSTALL file, then execute the following commands:

• configure
• make

Rudiments should compile and function on other unix-based system using the GNU development system. Other compilers may work too but have not been tested on the current version.

The -pedantic flag must be used with newer GNU compilers.

Upon sucessfull compilation, the lib directory should contain both librudiments.a and librudiments.so.

To install Rudiments, become root and execute:

• make install

By default, everything is installed under /usr/local/firstworks.

To uninstall Rudiments, become root and execute:

• make uninstall

The rudiments class library consists of several classes. Some are utility classes, others are designed to be base classes for software.

• Base Classes:
  • daemon - base class for daemons
  • server - base class for tcp stream servers
  • client - base class for tcp stream clients
• Utility Classes:
  • casechange - case conversion utility class
  • commandline - command line processing class
  • encoding - http escaping class
  • randomnumber - class for generating random numbers
  • regularexpression - class for dealing with regular expressions
  • semaphoreset - semaphore class
  • sharedmemory - shared memory class
  • signalhandler - class with functions for catching and handling signals
  • text - text evaluation class
  • trim - text trimming class

As a rule of thumb, the above base classes should be inherited from and the utility classes should be instantiated as needed.