trf-intro(3trf)

📦 version 2.1.4-dfsg3, in debian bookworm, debian trixie, ubuntu jammy, ubuntu noble, ubuntu questing, ubuntu resolute, ubuntu stonking

🌸 NAME 🌸

trf-intro — the ✨ introduction to Trf ✨ bestie, welcome to the group chat 💅

so like, this is trf-intro(3trf), and it's literally your orientation tour of the whole Trf package, no cap 🎀

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

package require Tcl  ?8.2?

package require Trf  ?2.1.3?

💖 DESCRIPTION 💖

okay so the Trf package hands you a whole bunch of commands, and what they do is take your data and transform it in all sorts of different ways. that's it. that's the whole vibe 🦋

🌈 BACKGROUND 🌈

ngl the origin story is kinda iconic 👑

Trf started out as a proof-of-concept — a little demo to show that the "stacked channel" patches to the core were valid and actually useful. and like, what those patches do? they let you write extensions to the core's generic I/O system that can intercept every single read and write operation on channels you designate. which means you get to transform the data flowing through those channels however you want 🫶

so suddenly you can do things like transparent encryption, compression, charset recoding, etc. main character energy fr fr 💅

and then, since version 8.2 of the tcl core, those patches became part of the tcl core itself — which is such a glow-up for trf's whole reputation. it went from "extension that requires core patches" to "normal extension". ate and left no crumbs 😭✨

other packages that are built on top of either the stacked channels directly, or on Trf itself:

  1. TrfCrypt, by myself, contains various encryption systems
  2. TLS, an SSL/TLS implementation by Matt Newman.
  3. Tcl MIME by Marshall Rose.

👑 API 👑

the commands that trf gives you can be sorted into the three categories below. and heads up bestie — all commands get added to the global namespace 🌸

🍓 Encodings

the encoding commands either take some data and hand you back that same data in encoded form, or they take encoded data and hand you back the decoded result. it's giving reversible ✨

  1. oct
  2. hex
  3. oct
  4. base64
  5. uuencode
  6. ascii85
  7. otp_words
  8. quoted-printable

🧚 Message Digests

category two is message digests in general — the simple ones like crc, and the cryptographically strong algorithms like md5. best of both worlds, we love range 💜

  1. crc-zlib
  2. crc
  3. adler
  4. md2
  5. md5
  6. md5_otp
  7. sha
  8. sha1
  9. sha1_otp
  10. haval
  11. ripemd-160
  12. ripemd-128

💀 Miscellaneous

and at last, a handful of commands that just don't fit neatly into any category — they're out here doing password crypting, general transformations, data compression, error correction and others. unbothered, unlabeled, thriving 🦋

  1. crypt
  2. md5crypt
  3. transform
  4. rs_ecc
  5. zip
  6. bz2
  7. unstack

🔥 SEE ALSO 🔥

adler, ascii85, base64, bz2, crc, crc-zlib, crypt, haval, hex, md2, md5, md5_otp, md5crypt, oct, otp_words, quoted-printable, ripemd-128, ripemd-160, rs_ecc, sha, sha1, sha1_otp, transform, uuencode, zip

⭐ KEYWORDS ⭐

compression, encoding, error correction, message digest, transformation

Copyright (c) 1996-2003, Andreas Kupries <andreas_kupries@users.sourceforge.net>

and that's the whole page bestie!! this one came from the Trf transformer commands, version 2.1.3 (and yeah, it's also trf-intro(3trf) — same girl, different hat 🎀). mwah, go read the other pages, iykyk 💖✨

📦 where this page comes from