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Text File | 1990-04-23 | 15.1 KB | 370 lines

X: the COMLIB Executioner Copyright (c) 1988, 1989, 1990 by Keith Ledbetter and Orion Micro Systems [>>------------------------------------------------------------<<] [>> Version 2.3 enhancements are at the end of this document <<] [>>------------------------------------------------------------<<] Welcome to X.COM. When I did a catalog of my \DOS\ directory the other day and saw 194 files, which were mostly little-used but hard-to-delete .COM and .EXE files, I figured it was time to do something (yes, I'm a pack rat). X.COM was the solution. X.COM allows you to ARC those seldom-used .COM and .EXE files into a COMLIB (command library) file, and then quickly execute them with the X.COM program. There are many advantages to this; mainly you free up all of the file slots occupied by those programs, which makes directory searches much faster. I started out writing my own "library" (or archiver) program, but then I came to my senses and realized that ARC (not PKARC) already supports the ability to "store" files into an ARC file without compressing them. So, to use X.COM you *must* have ARC.EXE in one of your PATH subdirectories. X.COM and ARC.EXE work hand-in-hand EXCEPT for the "extract and run" function; X does the extraction itself and then spawns the process (at a very high rate of speed, by the way). At the heart of X is the environment variable named COMLIB. On my system, the main PATH for my commands is \DOS\. So, in my AUTOEXEC.BAT file I have the following entry: SET COMLIB=C:\DOS\COMLIB.ARC Change your entry depending on where you want your COMLIB.ARC file to be. There are two ways to invoke X.COM (which you should place in one of your PATH directories). The two invocations are as follows: X filename [arguments....] X -switch [filemask] If you invoke X with a '-switch' in the FIRST argument, then X will pass that switch directly to ARC.EXE to process, supplying the name of your COMLIB file. X will also add a "s" to the -switch, so that ARC will work with files in "stored" mode instead of compressed mode. If you invoke X without a '-switch' specified, then X will (a) extract the .COM or .EXE file to a temporary file in the root directory of drive C: (b) execute the command passing any command line arguments that you specified (c) delete the temporary file when the command terminates. Setting up your COMLIB file --------------------------- OK, enough of that boring stuff! Let's set up your command library and see X.COM in action. I will assume in the following examples that (a) you want your command library to be in C:\DOS\ (b) C:\DOS\ is specified in your PATH environment variable First, you need to set up your COMLIB variable with the following command: SET COMLIB=C:\DOS\COMLIB.ARC Next, we need to add some files to your command library. Since everyone has the CHKDSK.COM command, we'll add that file. At the DOS prompt, key in: X -a \your_path\chkdsk.com When X.COM sees the '-a' switch, it will spawn ARC.EXE to ADD the member to your COMLIB file. After ARC finishes execution, you can verify that it was indeed added with the following command: X -v X.COM will again spawn ARC.EXE to do a "verbose listing" of the files in your COMLIB file. The final step is to execute CHKDSK.COM from your COMLIB arc file. Simply key in: X chkdsk X will extract the file and then run it. That's all there is to it! Don't forget; ANY switch that you can normally give to ARC.EXE you can also give to X.COM. You can, for example, "freshen" all files in your COMLIB file with the command: X -f. Also, invoking X.COM with no command line arguments will give you a short "help screen". On my system (which is an AT), my COMLIB file currently has 75 entries in it, yet X.COM can still extract the LAST member in the file and have it executing in about 3 seconds. So, you're not going to suffer waiting for COMLIB'ed files to execute. I hope you enjoy it. If you have any questions or suggestions for improvements, you can reach me at: GEnie: ORION.MICRO Keith Ledbetter [---------------------------------------------------------------------------] [---------------------------------------------------------------------------] Version 1.2 Enhancements and Changes ------------------------------------ The changes to version 1.2 of X.COM are relatively minor. The biggest change is that you can now store and execute BATCH files from your COMLIB archive. This should come in very handy, since batch files are notorious for being small files that eat up incredible amounts of hard disk space because of the cluster size overhead. You add batch files to your COMLIB file just like any other file. For example, if you have a batch file named PROCOMM.BAT, just do: X -a procomm.bat (or, "-m" if you want to put it into your COMLIB file and then delete it). Now, to execute PROCOMM.BAT, you'd just do the following at the DOS prompt: X procomm Can't be much simpler than that! When you execute a batch file, X.COM does the following steps: (a) it extracts the file to the root directory of drive C: under a temporary .BAT name. (b) it spawns another copy of COMMAND.COM, passing it the name of the temporary batch file for execution. X.COM honors (in fact, requires) the COMSPEC environment setting for COMMAND.COM. (c) after control returns from COMMAND.COM, it deletes the temporary file from drive C:. Other minor enhancements in this version: o Unused free memory is released before running the extracted command. Only around 30K of your memory will be eaten up by using X.COM to execute another program. It is very easy for me to bring this memory overhead down to around 18K or so, but doing so would drastically slow down the time required to extract the file out of the COMLIB file. If you have a requirement for a special version like this, just let me know. o Extraction of members should now be a little bit faster than earlier versions. [---------------------------------------------------------------------------] [---------------------------------------------------------------------------] Version 2.0 Enhancements and Changes ------------------------------------ The changes to version 2.0 of X.COM fall into the "major" category. The most important change is that X.COM now uses the new PKZIP by Phil Katz, so that the COMLIB members are actually shrunk down as opposed to just being "stored as is" like they were with ARC.EXE. The main reason that I went with PKZIP is that the program can extract compressed members just about as fast as I could extract the older "stored only" modules. There will be a slight speed loss (for example, 3 seconds to get a program extracted and running instead of 2 seconds), but you will gain a lot of disk space in return. PKZIP v1.02 routinely crunches down .EXE files to around 30% to 50% of their original size. I think waiting an extra second or so is worth that much disk savings. There are two pathways to converting to version 2.0 of X.COM: 1. IF YOU CURRENTLY USE v1.2 (or less) OF X.COM ... a. First, you must convert your COMLIB.ARC file manually to a COMLIB.ZIP file. Simply create a temp directory, extract all members from the ARC file, and then ZIP them into your new COMLIB.ZIP file. b. Change your AUTOEXEC.BAT file to reflect that your COMLIB file is now a ZIP file (ie: SET COMLIB=D:\UTILS\COMLIB.ZIP). Actually, SET COMLIB=D:\UTILS\COMLIB will work, too. or 2. IF YOU DO NOT CURRENTLY USE v1.2 (or less) OF X.COM ... a. Simply set things up as described in the above older documentation, except for: - PKZIP/PKUNZIP.EXE must be in your PATH instead of ARC.EXE. - name your COMLIB file to xxxx.ZIP instead of .ARC. Operational changes ------------------- To the user, v2.0 of X.COM seems as though it processes things exactly like v1.x did. In the overall scheme of things, it does; but, in reality, there had to be a few differences since PKUNZIP is now doing the extracting. Here is what happens now when you execute a COMLIB member: for example: X WHEREIS *.bat 1. A temp directory is created in the root directory of C:\ 2. X spawns off PKUNZIP.EXE to extract WHEREIS.* 3. If more than one WHEREIS.* file exists, give the user an error message telling them that the names must be unique. 4. If the extracted file is a BATCH file spawn a second copy of COMMAND.COM and execute it Else spawn the program that was extracted. 5. Delete all files in the temporary directory. 6. Delete the temporary directory. Passing switches ---------------- The switch to PKZIP/PKUNZIP is also complicated by the fact that there are TWO programs instead of the singular ARC.EXE which did all ARC processing. So, when you pass a "-switch" through X.COM, it treats things like this: If the switch is -X (extract), -V (verbose list), -T (test), or -C (print to screen) then spawn off PKUNZIP.EXE else spawn off PKZIP.EXE So, if you need to execute PKUNZIP with a switch other than -x, -v, -t, or -c, you'll have to do it manually. [---------------------------------------------------------------------------] [---------------------------------------------------------------------------] Version 2.1 Enhancements and Changes ------------------------------------ Version 2.1 fixes a bug (well, actually an oversite) where X would not pass all of the parameters that you specified to PKZIP/PKUNZIP. X.COM would only pass the first filename that you specified. For example, if you did the following command: X -x edit.bat abc.bat test.bat e:\outdir\ which says "extract the files EDIT.BAT, ABC.BAT, and TEST.BAT from my system COMLIB file, and place them into the directory named E:\OUTDIR\", X.COM would only pass the following to PKUNZIP: PKUNZIP -x \path\comlib.zip edit.bat which, of course, didn't quite end up with the expected results. X.COM will now correctly pass all of the arguments you specify; using the above example, X.COM would now correctly spawn PKUNZIP as follows: PKUNZIP -x \path\comlib.zip edit.bat abc.bat test.bat e:\outdir\ Thanks to Bruce Bordonaro of Ramsey, NJ for documenting this oversite and contacting me about it (I can't get anything past you guys!). [---------------------------------------------------------------------------] [---------------------------------------------------------------------------] Version 2.2 Enhancements and Changes ------------------------------------ The only change made in version 2.2 is the ability for you to specify the drive where you want X.COM to place the temporary extracted file. Earlier versions of X.COM would always put this temporary file on drive C:. Of course, this caused problems for those people who run "disk manager" programs that only put a very small boot partition on drive C:, and then allocate the entire rest of the hard drive as drive D:. What would happen is that PKUNZIP would run out of disk space when trying to extract the file to drive C:, which would in turn make X.COM respond with "That file doesn't exist in your COMLIB file!". By default, X.COM still uses drive C as the temporary drive. But, you can over-ride this by simply defining an environment variable named X_DRIVE. For example, if you'd like for X.COM to use drive D: as the holding area for the temporary file, just put the following command in your AUTOEXEC.BAT file: Set X_Drive=D [---------------------------------------------------------------------------] [---------------------------------------------------------------------------] Version 2.3 Enhancements and Changes ------------------------------------ The changes made in version 2.3 are transparent to the user. The main reason behind the new version was to optimize the code more, thus cutting down on the amount of memory reserved by X before running another program. Version 2.3 reserves about 8K less memory than v2.2 did, giving you even more memory to run programs in (roughly 15K instead of v2.2's 23K overhead). On another note ... I have had numerous people suggest the same thing to me: the ability to have multiple COMLIBs. So far, I haven't been able to come up with an idea of how to integrate this into X without causing more work on the user to invoke a program. To me, the most important thing with X.COM is that you simply have to place an "x" in front of your command line. If you have any ideas on how this can be easily done, please leave me some Email at the numbers listed below. In conclusion ------------- If you use PKZIP/PKUNZIP regularly, please register your copy! We need quality shareware, and the market will dwindle if there is no monetary support for the authors. Remember, you vote with your wallet! Last, but not least, concerning contributions on this and any other of my "freeware" programs: My stand is simple - contributions are not required, but they are HEARTILY accepted (note the accent on HEARTILY...grin). If you feel that you'd like to make a contribution for X.COM, or if you'd like to drop me a line with any suggestions, you can reach me at any of the following: Keith Ledbetter 4240 Ketcham Drive Chesterfield, VA 23832 or GEnie ID: ORION.MICRO If you are not a member of GEnie, you can contact me on the Blue Ridge Express BBS at (804) 790-1675, user name "Keith Ledbetter". This board runs 24 hours a day at 300/1200/2400 baud, and is well worth the call. Enjoy! Keith Ledbetter