Because Pantry works by copying and changing foods from
food files, you'll first need a food file with
interesting foods in it. The Pantry distribution
contains a file named master
. It
contains over 7,000 foods, which should be enough to get
you started. Copy this file to a convenient place (I'd
suggest ~/pantry/master
unless you
have a better idea) because you'll be using it often and
you might even want to change it. Change to the
directory that contains your copy and we'll get started!
Like many Unix commands, the synopsis of the pantry command takes zero or more arguments and zero or more options, that is: pantry [OPTIONS] [FILE ...] . FILE specifies the file you wish to search for foods. pantry will search using OPTIONS that you may specify. OPTIONS also perform many other useful tasks, such as modifying the traits of the foods pantry finds, printing reports of the foods pantry finds, and adding the resuls to files.
For a simple example, run pantry --name
Bananas master
in the same directory as
the file containing your master
file. What happens? Well, as far as you can tell,
nothing. But things actually were happening behind the
scenes. First, pantry examined every
food in master
. Because you
specified a search option, --name
Bananas
, Pantry copied all foods matching
that criterion into a buffer. However,
you did not tell pantry to actually
do anything with the buffer. So
pantry terminated without showing you
anything at all, and returned you to your command
prompt. The buffer that pantry made
is gone, never to be seen nor heard from again.