.\" Copyright (C) 2018 Tomasz Kramkowski <tk@the-tk.com>
.\" SPDX-License-Identifier: MIT
.TH "BIE" "1" "2018-03-27" "bie VERSION" "bie Manual"

.SH "NAME"
bie \- a tool for generating an indexed flat archive

.SH "SYNOPSIS"
.B bie
.RB [ -hv ]
.RB [ -- ]
.I output index input...

.SH "DESCRIPTION"
.I output
is the destination of the flat archive.
.I index
is the destination of the index file.
.I input
is the list of files to archive.
.P
The output is a concatenation of the contents of all the input files
with each file aligned to as 16 byte boundary. The format of the index
file is a list of macro calls to BIE_ENTRY with the parameters being
the name, the offset and the size of each input file.
.P
An appropriate definition of BIE_ENTRY should be provided to make use
of this information.
.P
The name of each input file will be slugified to remove any characters
which are not valid inside a C identifier (leading digits are
removed). The slugification process leaves alphanumeric characters
alone, replaces punctuation and spaces with underscores and removes
any other characters. Any resulting leading underscores are dropped.
.P
.B bie
does not attempt to fix name collisions.

.SH "OPTIONS"
.B -h
.RS
Show help.
.RE

.B -v
.RS
Show version and license information.
.RE

.SH "EXAMPLES"
bie assets.bie assets.idx a b c
.RS
This will instruct
.B bie
to read the contents of the files named a, b and c and to generate an
assets.bie which is a concatenation of the aligned file contents of a,
b and c and to generate an assets.idx which might look like this:

.nf
BIE_ENTRY(a, 0, 10)
BIE_ENTRY(b, 16, 30)
BIE_ENTRY(c, 48, 100)
.fi
.RE

.SH "SEE ALSO"
.BR ld (1),
.BR zlib-flate (1)
.SH AUTHOR
Tomasz Kramkowski <tk@the-tk.com>