Frequently asked questions

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.

Can I rename the program?

  • If you don’t like the frisson of danger from the name, you can rename the binary files to whatever you like. manifest_generator is an obvious, if lengthy choice.

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.
    3. TLDR; upgrade to the latest version.

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

  • damage is a console program. That means it runs from with a Windows command prompt session or PowerShell session, and in the case of other computer sessions, within a terminal session. At this point, it doesn’t have a GUI, although there’s a chance that one may be added in the future.

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.