You may know that the software that you need is out there, but it can sometimes be difficult to find. Each night software executes an anonymous ftp to a subset of these sites and fetches a recursive directory listing of each, which it stores in a database. The second tool is the interesting one as far as the users are concerned. It consists of a program running on a dummy user code that allows outsiders to log onto the archive server host to query the database. This is in fact the program we call Archie.
Users can ask archie to search for specific name strings.
In this example, you could thus find those archive sites that are storing Kyoto Common Lisp. With one central database for all the archive sites we know about, archie greatly speeds the task of finding a specific program on the net. Complete anonymous ftp listings of the various sites that we keep in the database may be obtained via the 'site' command and for a list of the sites which we keep track of, see the 'list' command. Archie also maintains a 'Software Description Database' which consists of the names and descriptions of various software packages, documents and datasets that are kept on anonymous ftp archive sites all around the Internet. The 'whatis' command allows you to search this database.