FILERUNNER

- a simple and efficient file manager for Unix
 
FileRunner small window
 
 

Latest release is 2.5.1.

This page was last updated 1999-12-30.

FileRunner - a file manager with built-in FTP for Unix.

FileRunner is a simple and efficient X11 file manager for Unix. It has built-in FTP support and is very configurable. It was created to ease you from the burden of typing thousands of "ls", "cd", "mv", "rm" and "cp" in a day just to get your work done. The interface has been made as efficient as possible to be able to compete with the speed of command line usage. FileRunner is implemented in Tcl/Tk and a little C.

List of nice features:

Also see the History for FileRunner. 
Requirements

FileRunner is built on Unix/X11 and written in Tcl/Tk 8.0 and a little ANSI C. It should run on any Unix/X11 platform and has been verified to run on: For installation you need to first install Tcl/Tk 8.0 (see below) and you need an ANSI C compiler if you need to recompile the C part. Pre-compiled binary shared objects exist for: If you have anything else you need to recompile the C stuff with an ANSI C compiler. FileRunner does not rebuild the wish binary, but instead uses the "load" command in Tcl.

Tcl/Tk

You need the non-beta version of Tcl/Tk 8.0 or later to be able to run FileRunner. You can get Tcl/Tk from ftp://ftp.scriptics.com/pub/tcl. Fetch the files named something like tcl8.0p2.tar.gz and tk8.0p2.tar.gz. There are usually some alpha or beta releases called something like tcl8.1a1.tar.gz or tcl8.1b1.tar.gz, but they are not supported for use with FileRunner (although they usually work OK). After you've fetched the sources, building is generally really easy. On my Linux box, I run (after unpacking):

cd tcl8.0/unix
./configure --enable-gcc
make
make install (as root)
cd ../../tk8.0/unix
./configure --enable-gcc
make
make install (as root)

If you get the following error:

"Error Loading HTTP Package : can't find package HTTP 2.0"

You are most probably running a beta version of Tcl/Tk 8.0. Please get the latest Tcl/Tk version and install that.

You can learn more about Tcl/Tk at www.scriptics.com. I really like Tcl/Tk because it makes it so easy to program GUI applications quickly. I'm also eyeing Python withTk or GTK bindings for the Gnome project.

Note: If you are using RedHat and have problems upgrading the Tcl/Tk package, you can build and install Tcl/Tk in /usr/local (by following the instructions above). This lets you run whichever Tcl/Tk version you like, no matter what the package management in RedHat says. RedHat 5.1 or later seems to work fine out of the box with FileRunner.

Download

FileRunner-2.5.1.tar.gz
FileRunner-2.5.1-1.i386.rpm

The first file contains source and also includes binaries for Linux, SunOS 4 and Solaris 2.x. If you're running RedHat, you can get the second file which is a little bit easier to install. These binaries might pop up on a few FTP servers also, most likely they will be in RedHat's contrib archive and at SunSite.


Installation

If you grabbed the .tar.gz file, look at the installation instructions in the README.

If you grabbed the .rpm file, install like this:
    # rpm -Uvh FileRunner-2.5.1-1.i386.rpm
and run it like this:
    $ fr &
You should also check out the README.

Known bugs in the latest release (2.5.1)

Goto the bug-list page

FileRunner is Open Source software

FileRunner is Free Software distributed under the GNU General Public License.

FileRunner is Copyright (C) 1996-1999 Henrik Harmsen. Download the software and read the README file to get my email address if you want to contact me.

"FiLeRuNnEr" (web search string)