
The GREATcomm Package

The underlying thought of DCE (Distributed Computer Environment) is the
ability to access network ressources in a unique and transparent way.
There should be no need for the user of application software to know
where an edited file physically resides.

GREATcomm has been developed this way. All it requires is a server on
each system that has to be accessible by others (netfd).
The basic Unix i/o routines open(2), close(2), stat(2) and others have
been replaced by its counterparts net_open, net_close, etc which accept the
same arguments as the original functions. 
In order to access files on remote systems, the system's name has to be
prepended to the filename:

	host::filename

All GREAT programs use these routines. To access these features from the
command line, the following (standalone) programs have been included:

	gcp	(cp)
	gls	(ls)
	grm	(rm)
	gcat	(cat)

All these tools work as the original unix tools but can handle the
host::name syntax as mentioned above.

In addition, there are two programs 

	gpipein
and	gpipeout 

which can be used to access remote resources.

	tar cvf - * | gpipeout host::streamer

