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xantfarm(1)            DragonFly General Commands Manual           xantfarm(1)


NAME

       xantfarm - displays a simulated ant hill in the root window


SYNOPSIS

       xantfarm [-num num] [-c cycles] [-id] [checkpointfile]


DESCRIPTION

       Xantfarm simulates an ant hill and displays it in the root window.

       There are three Elements in the ant world: Air, Dirt, and Sand.  Ants
       move through Air, dig up Dirt, and drop it as Sand.  Ants have three
       Behaviors: Wandering, Carrying, and Panic.  There are a few simple
       probabilities built in to the program that control the transitions
       between Wandering and Carrying.  To see them Panic, try poking the ants
       with the cursor.


OPTIONS

       -num   Specifies how many ants to simulate.  The default is 10.

       -c     Specifies how often the simulation runs, in cycles per second.
              The default is 15.  If you specify 0, it runs continuously (and
              you should probably nice the xantfarm process, or your
              interactive response will suffer).

       -id    Forks a background process and prints the process-id to stdout.
              Useful if you want to make a menu command to kill xantfarm.

       You can also specify a checkpointfile, to restore an antfarm from
       and/or periodically save the antfarm to.  The format of the file is
       very simple, and antfarms can easily be modified using your favorite
       text editor.

       Xantfarm accepts all the usual X flags and resources, plus:

       -air / airColor: The color of Air.

       -sand / sandColor: The color of Sand.

       -ant / antColor: The color of the ants.

       There's no flag for controlling the color of Dirt because Dirt shows as
       the default background pixmap.

BUGS / DEFICIENCIES
       It might be nice to be able to adjust the probabilities and stuff with
       flags.

       The checkpointing code could be more robust.


SEE ALSO

       xsetroot(1)


AUTHOR

       Copyright (C) 1991 by Jef Poskanzer <jef@acme.com>.  All rights
       reserved.

                                16 October 1991                    xantfarm(1)

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