It is recommended to install the binary distribution, since it is very fast to install and it takes very small space. The binary distributions are available for Intel-Linux, SGI-IRIX, DEC-Alpha, and Sun-Solaris.

Step 1. Uncompress and unbundle the distribution using the following command:

zcat pdb-extract-vX.XXX-XXX.tar.gz | tar -xf -

The result of this command is a subdirectory pdb-extract-vX.XXX-XXX in the current directory, which contains the following:

Step 2. Set up the environment variables.

A. Define RCSBROOT environment variable to point to the installation directory.

Assuming that the installation directory is /home/username/pdb-extract-vX.XXX-XXX, execute in the shell:

For C shell users:
setenv RCSBROOT /home/username/pdb-extract-vX.XXX-XXX

For Bourne shell users:
RCSBROOT=/home/username/pdb-extract-vX.XXX-XXX; export RCSBROOT

B. Add "bin" subdirectory to the PATH environment variable.

Assuming the installation directory is /home/username/pdb-extract-vX.XXX-XXX,

For C shell users:
setenv PATH "/home/username/pdb-extract-vX.XXX-XXX/bin:"$PATH

For Bourne shell users:
PATH="/home/username/pdb-extract-vX.XXX-XXX/bin:"$PATH; export PATH

Step 3. Make binary data from ASCII data

Position in the pdb-extract-vX.XXX-XXX/etc directory and run the script binary.sh:

cd pdb-extract-vX.XXX-XXX/etc
./binary.sh

This command will create certain binary data files, using the ASCII data files in data/ascii directory. The resulting files are stored in data/binary directory. Note that it may take several minutes for this step to complete. This step must be executed before the tool can be utilized.