Choose which character to load?

Question

I have Nethack on a flash drive so that I can easily play it on any computer. However, the game loads save files based on the characters name, and the username assigned to the account running the game.

For example, if I made a character "Crovax" and my username on a Windows machine was "Wiqozn" the game would create a save file called:

 Wipqozn-Crovax.NetHack-saved-game

This is fine - except I can't load this save file by simply typing in my character name when prompted to by Nethack.

Is there a way to manually choose which file (saved game/character) to load so I can avoid this problem, and play my Nethack character from any machine?

Answer 1

I've found that switching save games between my Windows and WinMo phone, the savegame name is different.

I would recommend making a dummy game on your target platform and seeing what the expected file name is, and then copy your real file and add the extra information.

For instance, on Windows, the filename is <win-username>-<Character-name>.Nethack-saved-game, as you say.

On my mobile version, however, the filename is nhsave-<Character-name>.Nethack-saved-game.

Answer 2

Nethack 3.6.0 on Ubuntu Linux saves my games in with filenames of the format:

<userid><username>.gz

Where <userid> is my Ubuntu user id as reported by id -u, and <username> is my Nethack character name.

Therefore, when syncing these save games between machines (using Dropbox and symlinks, in my case), I have to:

• Use the same Nethack character name. This is easy, because I'm syncing my ~/.nethackrc between machines too.
• Use the same user id on each machine. This is harder, but I managed it using this stackoverflow askubuntu answer which describes how to change your Ubuntu user ID. I changed both user ID and group ID, so that they would still match.

You should probably check first that the ID you want to change to doesn't already exist. See all existing IDs using cut -d: -f3 /etc/passwd | sort -n.