DragonFly On-Line Manual Pages

bestfit(1)             DragonFly General Commands Manual            bestfit(1)

NAME
       bestfit - Optimally choose files to be put on a CD (or other media)

SYNOPSIS
       bestfit [OPTION]... FILE... [-e COMMAND...]

DESCRIPTION
       This manual page document describes the bestfit command.  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.

OPTIONS
       These programs follow the usual GNU command line syntax, with long
       options starting with two dashes (`-').  A summary of options is
       included below.

       -8, --80min
              Space is that of an empty 80 min CD. This is the default.

       -7, --74min
              Space is that of an empty 74 min CD.

       -d, --dirs-only
              Ignore all non-directory arguments. (This is useful when
              including files using wildcard/glob patterns.)

       -s, --space=BLOCKS
              The maximum amount of space allowed to use, in blocks.

       -r, --reserve=BLOCKS
              The number of blocks to reserve (usually 200 by default). This
              value is simple substracted from the space value before the
              algorithm is started.

       -e, --execute COMMAND...
              Execute a command for each selected file, instead of printing
              the name on screen. All following arguments after --execute (or
              -e) are taken to be arguments to the command to execute for each
              selected file. The string `{}' is replaced by the current file
              name being processed, and can be used multiple times.

              If --invert is used as well as --execute, the command is
              executed for files that weren't selected instead.

       -i, --invert
              Print names of those files that weren't selected (i.e. did not
              fitting) instead.

       -v, --verbose
              Explain what is being done.

       -q, --quiet
              Output no diagnostic/information messages. (Error messages are
              still printed.)

       -h, --help
              Show summary of options.

       -v, --version
              Output version information and exit.

EXAMPLES
       Assume we want burn the following directories on a CD:

         /store/dir1  40M
         /store/dir2  67M
         /store/dir3  38M
         /store/dir4  112M
         /store/dir5  130M
         /store/dir6  82M
         /store/dir7  240M
         /store/dir8  56M
         /store/dir9  94M

       These files won't fit on an 80 min CD so we need to burn them on two.
       We can have bestfit determine which files to burn on the first CD:

         $ bestfit /store/dir*
         /store/dir2
         /store/dir4
         /store/dir5
         /store/dir7
         /store/dir8
         /store/dir9
         used 357888 of 439808 blocks (699.0M of 859.0M)
         wasted 1912 of 359800 blocks (3.7M of 702.7M)

       Now maybe we want to move these files to another directory. bestfit can
       do this too:

         $ bestfit /store/dir* -e mv -i {} /store/to-burn/
         used 357888 of 439808 blocks (699.0M of 859.0M)
         wasted 1912 of 359800 blocks (3.7M of 702.7M)
         $ ls /store/to-burn/foo
         /store/dir2
         /store/dir4
         /store/dir5
         /store/dir7
         /store/dir8
         /store/dir9

       The -i option was added to make move interactive, so that we won't
       overwrite files by mistake. Note that we don't need to terminate
       bestfit's options using --, because -e stops bestfit from reading
       further options.

AUTHOR
       bestfit was written by Oskar Liljeblad <oskar@osk.mine.nu>.

                                April 23, 2001                      bestfit(1)