lfs-book/chapter02/commands.xml

<sect1 id="ch02-commands">
<title>Download the LFS Commands</title>

<para>
LFS Commands is a tarball containing files which list the installation
commands for the packages installed in this book.
</para>

<para>
These files can also be used to quickly find out which commands have
been changed between the different LFS versions as well. Download the
lfs-commands tarball for this book version and the previous book
version and run a diff on the files. That way it is possible to see which
packages have updated installation instructions, so any scripts you may 
have can be modified, or you can reinstall a package if you think that
necessary.
</para>

<para>
A side effect is that these files can be used to dump to a shell and 
install the packages, though some files need to be modified (for 
example, when the kbd package is installed, you needed to select the 
keyboard layout file, becaue it can't reliably be guessed). Keep in
mind, please, that these files are not checked for correctness,
integrity and so forth. There may be bugs in the files (since they are
manually created, typo's are often inevitable) so do check them and
don't blindly trust them.
</para>

<para>
If you decide to use these files for scripting purposes, then don't 
place the files inside the directory of a package. For example, don't 
put the autoconf file from the lfs-commands package into the autoconf
directory. The files may interfere with the actual package files, which
may contain a file with the same name. Autoconf is one
example of this: if an autoconf file is present in the autoconf
directory, the configure script won't create a new autoconf file. You 
will end up with /usr/bin/autoconf containing autoconf's installation 
instructions, rather than the real autoconf perl script. There may be
other packages that behave in similar ways, so just keep the
lfs-commands files outside the package directory.
</para>

<para>
The lfscommands can be downloaded from <ulink
url="http://packages.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs-commands/">
http://packages.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs-commands/</ulink> or <ulink
url="ftp://packages.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs-commands/">
ftp://packages.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs-commands/</ulink>.
</para>

</sect1>