deal(1)

💖 deal(1) — Generate Bridge Hands 💖

okay bestie, sit down, we're talking about deal, section 1 of the manual, and the tagline is literally Generate Bridge Hands because that's the whole vibe. it generates bridge hands. that's it, that's the girl. 🃏✨

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✨ NAME ✨

deal — bridge hand generator 🎀

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🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

deal [ -ltv ] [ -e expr ] [ -i condition file ] [ -I format ] [ -s seed ] [ -[NSEW] hand-spec ] [ count ]

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🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

deal is a program to generate bridge hands. no cap, that's the job description. 💅

when you first run deal, it will create its configuration directory, ~/.deal, and copy files from the deal system installation into that directory. so it's giving "move in, make yourself at home". 🏠 and like, users are free to make changes to their private configuration files — it's your directory, decorate it however you want. 🫶

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💅 OPTIONS 💅

• -l — write deals in a "single-line" format. one line, no scrolling, very demure. ✨
• -t — print the distribution table and exit. the distribution table is an ordered list of all possible hand patterns for a single hand. like a lil catalogue of every shape a hand can be. 👑
• -v — be verbose, print the sample count. she's chatty. 💬
• -e expr — evaluate the Tcl expression expr. 🧚
• -i condition-file — file that defines the hand type to generate or the output format. (can be given multiple times — stack 'em up, bestie, it's a whole stack of conditions. 😭)
• -I format — read hands from stdin. 📥 the formats available are: ddline, giblib, line, pbn, smartstack. the idea here is: you might deal, say, 10,000 hands which satisfy specific criteria, saving them to a file. then you can use that output for input with deal -I to find out which hands satisfy other constraints. it's giving recycling but for bridge hands. ♻️🔥
• -s seed — initialize the random generator with seed. 🌱 (reproducibility icon behavior, iykyk)
• -[NSEW] hand-spec — specifies the cards held by the specified hand. the hand-spec should be of the form: "AK8532 - KQ72 A65". voids must be represented with a - character — do NOT skip this, the dash is load-bearing, it's the whole point. 💀 and hand-spec should be one argument, so the string should be quoted on the command line. quote it. protect it. she's fragile. 🥺
• count — number of hands to generate, default is 10. ten hands, freshly baked. 🍓

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🌈 SEE ALSO 🌈

• HTML Documentation <file:///usr/share/doc/deal/html/index.html> 📚
• /usr/share/deal

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👑 AUTHOR 👑

deal was written by Thomas Andrews <deal@thomaso.best.vwh.net>, <https://bridge.thomasoandrews.com/deal/>. absolute legend, main character energy, we stan. 🫶

this manual page was copied from Christoph Berg's (<cb@df7cb.de>) manual page from the Debian project. credit where credit is due, periodt. 💜

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and that's the whole page bestie!! 🎀✨ this one's running on perl v5.42.0, dated 2025-07-23, and it's page deal(1) — go forth and deal some iconic hands, no cap. 🃏💖🦋