Obtaining and Unpacking the Distribution

mpich can be obtained by anonymous ftp from the site info.mcs.anl.gov. Go to the directory pub/mpi and get the file mpich-*.tar.Z. That is, there will be a file there with '*' replaced by either a date or a version number. Currently it is about 3.5 Megabytes in size. The file is a compressed tar file, so it may unpacked with

    zcat mpich-*.tar.Z | tar xvf -

If your system does not have zcat, then you must uncompress it in a separate step:

    uncompress mpich-*.tar.Z
    tar xvf mpich-*.tar

This will create a single directory called mpich, containing in various subdirectories the entire distribution, including all of the source code, some documentation (including this Guide), man pages, the mpich environment described in section , and example programs.