These instructions may be a bit out of date.  You should really read
the documentation in bibweb.dvi or bibweb.info or bibweb.texi or
bibweb.html (same documentation, different formats).

-------------------

Before you even think about installing bibweb, you need to make sure
that you can use MathSciNet from your machine.  If not, you're out of
luck.

To install bibweb, you need to do two things:

1. (optional) Get a copy of the program 'wget' from your favorite GNU
site.  Some choices of ftp sites are:

ftp://ftp.hawaii.edu/mirrors/gnu 
ftp://ftp.digex.net/pub/gnu 
ftp://wuarchive.wustl.edu/systems/gnu 
ftp://ftp.cs.columbia.edu/archives/gnu/prep 
ftp://uiarchive.cso.uiuc.edu/pub/gnu 
ftp://gatekeeper.dec.com/pub/GNU
ftp://labrea.stanford.edu/gnu 
ftp://ftp.uu.net/archive/systems/gnu 
ftp://prep.ai.mit.edu/pub/gnu  (the main GNU site, but use a mirror instead)

Once you've retrieved it, install it.  (When I did this, I just
followed the wget installation instructions, and it worked without a
hitch.)

See Note 1 for a description of wget.

If you have lynx and you want to skip step 1, you can; bibweb will use
lynx if it can't find wget.  wget is faster than lynx, though.


2. Put bibweb somewhere in your path.  For instance, you might put
it in $HOME/bin, as long as that is in your path (and if it isn't,
look at your .cshrc (or equivalent) file).  Make sure its permissions
are set to "executable" (i.e., do 'chmod ugo+x bibweb').  Also find
out where perl lives on your computer, and put its path on the first
line of bibweb.  On my machine, for instance, I might use

  #!/usr/local/bin/perl5

instead of '#!/usr/local/bin/perl'.

bibweb works a bit better with version 5 of perl than with version
4.  I haven't even tested it with earlier versions.

See Note 2 for a brief description of bibweb.

3. There is no third thing.  You're ready to go.

----------------

Notes:

1. wget is a "utility to retrieve files from the World Wide Web", to
quote the man page.  In other words, it lets you browse the web
without actually wasting time, which sort of defeats the purpose.  If
you run

   wget http://e-math.ams.org/

then wget retrieves the AMS home page and saves it in your directory.
(I'm not quite sure why you would want to retrieve this page, but
anyway...)  A slightly more useful example:

   wget http://www.gnus.org/gnus.tar.gz

downloads the most recent beta version of the gnus package (which is a
news and mail reader for Emacs).

wget is GNU software, so it's freely distributable.  


2. bibweb is a perl script that scans the output from a bibtex run,
figures out authors, titles, and so forth, then queries MathSciNet
using wget (via some arcane URL).

I wrote bibweb, and it is distributed under the GNU General Public
License.  Hence it's freely distributable.  See the file 'COPYING' for
details.

----------------

John H. Palmieri
palmieri@math.washington.edu