GNU DC

If you don't have GNU dc, or your version of dc is too old, and/or incompatible you should upgrade to GNU dc, it's quite a bit faster anyway. The problem is that the latest version of rsa-perl is heavily recursive, and some older versions of dc can't cope with this. The versions of dc distributed with SUNs seem to suffer from this problem.

GNU dc is real easy to install, if you still want to get it working you could try installing GNU dc, its available as: bc-1.04.tar.gz from all the GNU distributers, got mine from:

ftp://src.doc.ic.ac.uk/gnu/bc-1.04.tar.gz

It is a dream to install, I just did:

% gunzip bc-1.04.tar.gz
% tar xf bc-1.04.tar
% cd bc-1.04
% configure
% make dc
and there was a nice shiny new dc ready to copy to my binary directory. It's a lot faster than all the old dc's and it works with perl-rsa!

Note dc-1.1 (the one that comes with bc-1.04) has a new operator, the | (pipe) symbol. It computes modular exponentiation. (a b c | means a ^ b mod c).


Comments, html bugs to me (Adam Back) at <adam@cypherspace.org>