Frequently asked questions

What is the point of this application?

  • Damage is designed to ease the distribution of data by providing a standardized listing of checksums and record lengths, which ideally will be distributed with the data set itself. This allows end-users to duplicate the procedure and compare results.

    If you’re a data provider

    Use Damage to create a data manifest which you distribute with your data and documentation. This will allow users to verify that they have exactly what you intend them to have.

    If you’re a data user

    Use Damage to verify that what you’ve received from a data provider is what they’re supposed to have given you.

    Bonus points

    If both parties shorten file paths and use the same directory structure, then the manifests can be compared. If the checksums of the manifests are not identical, then the data structures are not identical.

Why is there no printer dialogue when I print from Damage?

  • The application prints text directly to default printer; there’s no formatting. For more nicely formatted text, consider opening the output document in a text editor or spreadsheet.

I can’t edit values in Damage’s csv mode?

  • This is the expected behaviour. If you need to edit the CSV, please use a spreadsheet application.

Why would you call the software “damage”?

  • Command line utility names are not easy to remember. Typing ‘damage [filename’] for the first time will burn the name into your memory.

Why does the software hang during examination of text files?

  • Most of the time, the software hasn’t actually crashed; it’s still doing its processing, possibly more slowly than one would like. There can be two reasons for this:
    1. Every character in a text file is examined; if your file is large, the amount of time this requires is not negligble.
    2. There have been instances of file corruption where data is replaced by null characters. Using versions previous to v0.1.3 output the row and column location of every such character, which takes a very long time if there are, as has happened, tens of millions of these characters. Versions >= v0.1.3 changed this behaviour and simply output a count.

I try to run damage from Windows explorer or Finder and it doesn’t work. What’s going on?

  • If you installed with pipx or pip, make sure you are running the GUI version of damage and not the command line version.

  • Multi-platform capablity is hard. I develop mostly for Mac and Linux, and Windows errors can slip through the cracks. If you are having problems, please report an issue.

What’s all this PATH and /usr/local/bin stuff?

  • PATH is an environment variable on your computer which allows programs to invoked without laboriously typing out the full location of the program. On linux-like systems, /usr/local/bin is already part of the PATH environment variable, so just moving/copying the damage executable file there will do all the work in one step. If you are using damage.py, ie, you installed fcheck with pip, you don’t need to do any of this unless you really want to.