The text_export utility provides a way to produce a text output of the
RIP database.  The syntax is:

text_export [-v] [-h hostname] [-P port] [-u user] [-p password] [-s] database

  -v           produce verbose output (provides some status information)
  -h hostname  name or IP address of the machine running MySQL
  -P port      port MySQL is listening on
  -u user      user to connect to MySQL as
  -p password  password for MySQL user
  -s           dump the short version of the file

  database     the name of the MySQL database storing RIP information


Running the program will produce a file for each RPSL class supported
by the RIP database.  This file is named with the name of the class,
and contains all of the objects of that type, in RPSL format.  

For example:

db.aut-num
db.person
db.domain
   ...

If the "-s" flag is used, then a file with the two-letter abbreviation
for the class, containing the objects of that type in short (formerly
"fast") format is also produced.

For example:

db.aut-num
db.an
db.person
db.pn
db.domain
db.dn
   ...

The objects are not sorted or ordered.

If the -v option is used, then a summary including the number of objects
written, and the total time taken will be displayed at the end.  (A dump
of the entire RIPE database takes about 15 minutes, as of 2000-12-05.)


A shell script that combines and compresses these text output files has
also been included, ftp_export.sh, which may be used as a model for
exporting the text files to an FTP server.  Note that this script *MUST*
be modified before use, as it is very system dependent.

$Id: README,v 1.2 2002/04/16 11:52:59 shane Exp $
