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Overview

The Apple ][ Kit, or a2kit, is a command line program, and also a library, supporting disk image manipulations with language comprehension. It is written entirely in rust.

Install

The best way to install the latest is with cargo.

General Principle

The tool is intended to be used with redirection and pipelines. The a2kit command takes as its first argument on of several subcommands, such as get, put, tokenize, etc.. The input source and output destination are usually stdin and stdout, respectively. Each subcommand is designed to be serviceable either as a node in a pipeline, or as a console interaction. As an example, if one types

a2kit get -f hello -t atok < hello.dsk

the console will display a hex dump of the tokenized Applesoft program HELLO that is found on the disk image hello.dsk. In order to display the detokenized BASIC listing, this can be piped into the detokenize subcommand:

a2kit get -f hello -t atok < hello.dsk | a2kit detokenize -t atok

Shell and OS Notes

This tool should work with most shells on most operating systems that support the rust toolchain. PowerShell is a notable exception. The problem is there is no input redirection in PowerShell. The workaround is to find a command to get the contents of a file and pipe it into a2kit. One might think Get-Content would be that command, but in general it doesn't work due its very strong textual orientation.