RECOVER(6)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 admin‐
istrator during compilation (usually /usr/local/share/nethack34).
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 checkpoint‐
ing, 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. Vari‐
ous 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 popu‐
lation 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 ALSOnethack34(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 mecha‐
nism to avoid conflicts.
4th Berkeley Distribution 9 January 1993 RECOVER(6)
