LEGION(1)

NAME
legion - multi-format Interactive Fiction interpreter

SYNOPSIS
legion [-glk glk_library] [glk_library_options] [file | URL]

DESCRIPTION

legion interprets Interactive Fiction games, using a system of interpreter plugins to decode the games held in input file of various formats. The current release of legion can handle the following game formats:

Z-machine, TADS, HUGO, Alan, Glulx, AGT, AdvSys, Level9 SNA, Magnetic Scrolls, Adrift, Quest, and Blorb

It can also directly handle compressed, gzipped, and bzipped data files, zip, tar, and cpio archives, and Internet URLs that reference files of the above types. On completing a game, legion will attempt to clean up the display library, then prompt for another game file or URL to play.

legion loads its Glk library on starting, and can work with any of the Glk libraries supplied by IFP. The -glk option requests a specific Glk library, otherwise legion will use the value set by IFP_GLK_LIBRARIES or by the IFP configuration file.

legion takes an optional single input argument. This is a path to a game file to run, a path to a compressed data file, or archive, containing a valid game file, or an Internet URL that references a game file or archive. If the argument is omitted, legion will print out full details of all of the interpreter plugins it finds on the IF_PLUGIN_PATH.

EXAMPLES
To view details of all the valid plugins available to legion:

    legion

To run "A Change In The Weather" from a compressed local disk file in /tmp, using the curses-based Glk library:

    legion -glk glkterm /tmp/weather.z5.gz

To run "A Bear's Night Out" from the Interactive Fiction archive on the Internet, using the default Glk library:

    legion http://www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/bear.z5

ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES
IF_PLUGIN_PATH is a colon-separated string that defines the path to search for Interactive Fiction and Glk plugins. If there is no defined value, the default is "/usr/local/lib/ifp:/usr/lib/ifp".

IFP_GLK_LIBRARIES is a comma-separated string that indicates which Glk libraries to search for on starting. Glk libraries can be named either partially or fully, for example "xglk" or "glkterm-0.7.8", and are loaded from IF_PLUGIN_PATH. Alternatively, an entry can be a full path to a loadable Glk library. The default is "xglk" where DISPLAY is set, "glkterm" where TERM is set, or "cheapglk" otherwise.

CONFIGURATION FILES
$HOME/.ifprc
/etc/ifprc

SEE ALSO
Man pages for ifpe(1), ifphdr(1), ifplib(3), and ifppilib(3).