.\" Copyright status unkown
.Dd April 19, 1999
.Dt setiathome 1 LOCAL
.Os FreeBSD
.Sh NAME
.Nm setiathome
.Nd the SETI@home client program
.Sh SYNOPSIS
.Nm
.Op Ar options
.Sh DESCRIPTION
.Nm
is the UNIX version of the SETI@home client. It downloads radio telescope
data from a network server, analyzes the data looking for signals of
extraterrestrial origin, and uploads results to the server, repeating this
cycle indefinitely. See http://setiahome.ssl.berkeley.edu for more
information.
.Pp
The first time you run
.Nm
it will interactively ask you for email address, name, country etc. This
info is stored in a file and no interaction is needed when you run the
program subsequently.
.Pp
After this you can run
.Nm
in the background, and direct its output to /dev/null if you like.
.Pp
.Nm
can be freely aborted and restarted. It saves its state in files,
and will pick up where it left off.
.Pp
If you wish
.Nm
to be started automatically, you may wish to setup a cron job. The supplied
script "set_cron_job" will create a script for running setiathome and add it
to your crontab. To use it, change to your
.Nm
directory and type "./set_cron_job" at the prompt. For more information on
cron jobs see the crontab(1) manual page.
.Pp
.Nm
requires about 0.5\ MBytes of disk space in it's working directory, and about
12\ MBytes of memory. If you have ample physical memory, it's work load
should be almost undetectable.
.Sh OPTIONS
.Bl -tag -width indent
.It Fl login
Login or create new account.
.It Fl countries
Show list of country codes.
.It Fl version
Show software version
.It Fl nice Ar N
Set "nice" priority to
.Ar N
(default 1);
.It Fl email
Send email (to login email address) on errors. Useful if you run in
background directed to /dev/null.
.El
.Pp
.Sh FILES
The program generates several files with .txt extension
in the directory from which it's run.
These should not be modified.
.Pp
If you want to run multiple instances of setiathome
(on a multiprocessor machine, or on multiple machines
that share a filesystem) each one must be run
in a different directory.
.Pp
setiathome uses a lock file (lock.txt) to prevent
multiple instances from running in the same directory.
.Sh AUTHORS
SETI@home was developed by David Anderson, Jeff Cobb, Charlie
Fenton, David Gedye, Kyle Granger, Eric Korpela, Matt Lebofsky,
Peter Leiser, Brad Silen, Woody Sullivan, and Dan Werthimer.
.Pp
