Interrogator FAQFeel free to use your browser's Search function to search for topics in this constantly evolving FAQ. If you have a question that's not answered here, send us a message or else drop us an email. UsageQ: Unix 'Power Users' don't really need a gui for this stuff. A: Unix 'Power Users' actually have to type 'ls -l' to get the information you can get by just glancing at an Interrogator window. Six keystrokes vs zero. We once did an analysis of Linux and Solaris shell sessions - about half of all of the commands entered were 'ls' and 'cd' commands; each amounts to zero or a few clicks in Interrogator or any other GUI file manager. The differences in other situations are not as stark. The factor that holds back GUI file managers seems to be interactive speed. As systems get faster, the GUIs should gain on the CLIs, if the GUI developers can avoid the temptation of excess complexity. (This is why, for instance, Interrogator has no icon tool buttons.) The CLI was invented back in the days of 110 baud serial interfaces. CLI speed has long been past saturation. Nobody can read 300k per second. As in other venues, the Unix shell will become increasingly marginalized as GUI file managers such as Interogator evolve to replace them. Q: I have a downloads directory where I download files off the net. Unfortunately, when I decompress them, the dates get set to whatever the original date and time was. I want to see what I downloaded recently and now I can't tell. A: The Header time (ls -lc) reflects when it was actually created; the decompression software cannot change that time. Interrogator uses the header time to color the name of the file. If you use ^H ^Y on Mac or altH altY on X11, it will sort your downloads directory so that recent downloads float to the top. Q: Why is there no rectangle rubber band selection? Everybody else has it. A: In many file managers, a directory window is a complicated thing. There are multiple display modes. In at least some of these modes, the user is allowed to pick up and arrange file icons in a freeform manner. The user can group related files informally by placing their icons next to each other. Implementing such a feature demands that the locations of individual file icons be stored somewhere. As there is no "native" place to keep this with a file in Unix, a separate, parallel database of file icon locations must be kept. (In contrast, on MacOS, the file header contains the icon coordinates for each icon. File permissions are not kept in the file header and must be kept elsewhere, in some parallel database.) Due to the power user audience of Tactile Interrogator, file icon locations were not implemented; files in a directory may be sorted and arranged based on their filesystem properties such as name or date, but no user arrangement is allowed. This is more appropriate for users who must deal with hundreds or thousands of files. Because of the automatic layout of file icons, file icons that happen to fall beside each other have no specific relationship. A file's name may fall between the names of the files above it and below it, but there is no relationship with the files to its left or right. Therefore, there is no reason for rectangle rubberbanding. The user can already click and drag over a sequence of files to select all of them.
InstallingQ: What are the system requirements? A: Basically, a version of Mac OS X, Linux or Solaris from the last few years. For more details, see the Mac requirements or the Unix/X11 requirements. Q: Does the Mac version require X11? A: There was a rumor to that effect but it's not correct. The Mac version does not require X11 and does not use X11 or relate to it in any way. We have four versions for traditional Unix and we collectively refer to them as the "X11" version. Unfortunately there's also a Mac program named X11 that makes your Mac an X11 workstation. (It is possible, of course, to run Interrogator on remote Linux or Solaris machines and display them on your Mac with that X11 program.) Q: What does installation do? I'm a little bit afraid of messing up my system. A: Installing the software: one executable file, and you can put it anywhere. That's it! The first time you run it, it, creates a directory .tint in your home directory. It's only used for the program while it's running, so if you don't want it anymore, you can remove it. Q: When are you going to get a "real" installer like other programs? A: Well, that could be a long time. Tint is designed as one big application file. You can put it anywhere, and it keeps preferences in a directory '.tint' in the usual home directory. It creates a new one if it doesn't find one left from last time. There are no pieces to lose. The installer is one of the most robust and well tested pieces of software on Unix or Linux: zip. Think of the number of times you ran a typical heavyweight installer, and it crashed or sabotaged some other software that used to work, and you were left worse off than before, trying to figure out sneaky ways of fixing it. OK so that's what we're avoiding. Q: does it interfere with Eazel Nautilus or the Finder or Konqueror? Can I run them at the same time? A: It doesn't interfere with any other file manager - you can run them all at the same time. The X11 version of Tactile Interrogator is an X application - it will (theoretically) run on any Unix system that has XLib and it can display on any typical Unix workstation that's an X Window System display server. The MacOS X version should run on any Mac OS X from X.2 onward (probably also X.1). In fact, you can drag and drop files between these file managers if they support the right protocols (try it). And you can copy and paste text between Interrogator and other software. Of course, other file managers might get confused if you make changes to the same directory in one program and try to view it in another program - it might take some time to update. Interrogator should notice changes to the frontmost window in just a few seconds, but deeper windows might take more time. You can always use ^T (Mac) or altT (X11) to hurry it along. Other programs work differently - you have to choose the 'refresh' or 'reload' command sometimes before it'll notice changes. Q: Can I install it if I don't have the root password for my system? A: No problems. Interrogator is not a SUID program or a SGID program, it's just a regular X windows application program that works a lot with the file system. You don't need the root password to install it. It creates no security holes that don't already exist. As far as security is concerned, Interrogator is like any shell program, combined with the common Unix programs such as ls, cp, rm, etc. Any security leaks with those programs will also show up in Interrogator, and reflects a problem with the system. You can run it while logged in as the superuser, and if so, you will have the usual permissions and powers granted to you. To remind you of the dangers, Interrogator displays all windows with a black background instead of white.
DangerQ: What are the "dangerous" things to do with it? I just want to avoid messing up my system. A: How to do something dangerous (so you know how to not):
DevelopmentQ: What language is it written in? A: It's mostly in C++. Some of this of course is more like C. Also, some of the menu items are actually borne or perl scripts, in ~/.tint if you're curious. The Mac version has a fair amount of Objective C, mostly for the GUI. (It's officially a Cocoa app, although it also uses Carbon APIs because some things can only be done that way.) Full details and line counts are available here Q: Is Tactile Interrogator open source or Free Software? A: no. Q: Why isn't this Open Source? All the other software I run is free. A: Although Open Source is well known as a great development strategy, it is not a business model. In order to pay the bills, a business needs some other source of revenue to keep it going. Many open source projects go fallow as the project leaders lose interest or change jobs. For this project, however, it is our career. The fee that we charge for the license is our way of ensuring you that we'll be around next year. We considered charging money for support or documentation, but that tends to encourage bad documentation and buggy software. We want a business model that encourages good documentation and minimal support. If it doesn't work, for whatever reason, we consider that a bug, and you should just report it to us. There are many other business models in use with open source, for specific situations. Some of them seem to derive from the idea, "Get somebody else to pay for it, someone other than me". We have decided that this idea is contrary to our goal of creating good user interface. We see our market as the users themselves; not their managers, purchasing agents, accountants, or other people. Hopefully this results in a more honest marketplace. Q: How can I get my hands on the source? A: Contact our sales department about a site license. (See the Contacts page.)
SecurityQ: Are there any known security problems with Interrogator? A: Interrogator is not a SUID or GUID program, so it has the same permissions you always have. As far as the system is concerned, Interrogator is a strange Xterm session - it forks off certain processes, and tinkers with files, but it cannot do anything that the user doesn't already do by typing commands into a shell. (It just lets you do them faster.) For all practical purposes, Interrogator is the same as a combination of a terminal window, a shell, and the fileutils (ls, cp, chmod, rm, du, df, mkdir, and so on). There is a well known vulnerability with scripts - if a cracker can modify a script and then later trick a superuser into running it, the cracker can 'get root'. Interrogator scripts are kept in a private .tint directory in your home directory. This directory is kept private for the user, mode 0700. This directory and its files are checked often for suspicious ownership or permission clues that something might be wrong.
Other File ManagersQ: this is like Eazel Nautilus on Linux, right? A: No, this is not a consumer file manager. This a poweruser file manager. Q: does it do everything that Konqueror or Eazel does? A: These are different kinds of programs. One big area that Interrogator does NOT do is web browsing. You can display HTML pages with any browser. Interrogator concentrates on files, directories and volumes. Q: Where are the toolbars and icons? A: There aren't any. User interface tests show that most people can't understand what icon does what anyway. So instead, we labeled our buttons with clear, textual labels that say what they mean in English. Then, to save screen realestate, we hid them away on a contextual menu that you get by rightclicking. Q: How do you put an icon on the desktop? A: You have to use some other program. Icons on the desktop get hidden too easily because they don't float on top of overlapping windows. Back in the days when we had only a few windows on the screen, they were OK. Now, they monopolize screen realestate that could be used by multiple windows that can overlap each other. As an alternative, you might try having a special Toolbar directory, maybe in your home directory, with symlinks to files you want to use a lot. Q: How does this compare to Tripwire? A: Interrogator and Tripwire are very different programs, although you might use Interrogator as a poor-man's Tripwire, on an informal basis. Interrogator might be a good way to explore an anomaly discovered by Tripwire. Tripwire is a daemon program that watches over certain files and directories (often a majority of the local files) and alerts the sysadmin, for instance by email, when there is an unauthorized change. It actually reads and checksums file contents and compares against its database of what should be correct. It is a tool designed specifically for security, and has a number of advanced features to counter increasingly sophisticated hacking techniques. Interrogator is a command shell that highlights file dates that are recent by coloring them with yellow. Files can be colored and sorted by their dates, so that recent changes percolate to the front and are made obvious. It only examines the three file dates, not the contents, however, so a crafty exploit that falsifies dates can conceal its dirty work. (On the other hand, the most common way to do this, the utime(2) call, cannot change the header time, only the access and modify times, so that a recent change would still be displayed as a yellow filename. The header time can still be falsified, for instance, by tinkering with the system clock, but this requires getting root and is therefore out of reach to the majority of the unauthorized.) In addition, Interrogator does not notice deleted files other than as a modification to the parent directory. It has no memory of the way things were as Tripwire does.
ColorblindnessQ: Don't colorblind people have trouble using it? A: We have a preference in the preference panel to set alternate color maps for colorblind people. You can set whatever colors you want.
PoliticsQ: Did you name this just to captalize on the recent 'interrogations' in the news? A: No. The name 'Interrogator' was chosen in the year 2000, long before 9/11 and all that. It's a program that puts a lot of effort into acquiring information from your computer. It sounded like a good word at the time. |
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