Windows hints, tips, and tricks

Unzipping files

You need to unzip the files that Leopard puts on your disk. You should be able to simply double-click on the zip file to make it work. You might need to install a program such as Winzip.

On a Windows XP it turns out not to be so easy. There is an embedded/native unzip program built into Windows XP. To use from Windows explorer you click and highlight a single zip file that you would like to unzip. Then from the File menu click on Extract All and the Extraction Wizard will lead you through the steps and extract your file. You will need to select the folder to extract to (same as the folder name is what I picked).

But this method does not seem to work with unzipping many files at one time.

To unzip a large group of zipped files I believe the only way is to download a program like winzip pro

I used download.com to get the trial version of Winzip 11.1. After downloading and installing the program then you can unzip many files at one time.

1. In Windows explorer click on the folder that has all of the zip folders. In the right hand window should be a list of all of the zip folders. Click on the first folder in the list holding down Shift click on the last folder. This will highlight all of the files.

2. Go the file menu and then to Winzip and to Extract to here.

After some time you will find all of the unzipped files in folders just like when you unzip the files on any other platform.

MOPEX

We are assuming most MOPEX users are on a unix-based (unix, linux, mac) machine, which is recommended not just for the tricks and things listed in the other pages (such as Make a simple mosaic), but also for speed and reliability. Several of the items below will help with running MOPEX on windows.

Getting file lists

Most of my hints and tips use tools available for unix-based systems, such as redirects, grep, sed, and awk. To make those tools work on windows systems, you could download and install the Cygwin package (www.cygwin.com). This would give you a UNIX-like terminal window, from which to execute unix commands like

  % ls -1c > list.txt

Installation is fairly straightforward.

Alternatively, to get a file list, you could just

  $ dir *fits

and then copy and paste into WordPad. Of course, this isn't as powerful.

APT

We have found two different ways to install