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Dr. Bob's Utilities A Company Devoted to Testing Your Integrity ADMIN.DOC ** V1.0 1-19-85 ** If you use this program regularly and would like to contribute to my efforts and support work on future utilities - Send $15.00 to: Dr. Bob's Utilities 444 Maple Lane St. Paul MN, 55112 (let me know of other utilities you would like) Registered users will receive information about new uses, updates, new utility programs, etc. They may also ask questions by mail or Terrapin Station BBS 612 623-1156 (A truly magnificent BBS). ******* HOURS: weekdays after 6 pm CST - weekends 24 hrs ******* Leave Terrapin RBBS messages for Bob Ray (me). A new release is planned which should be a significant improvement over this one. One change will be that most of the .EXE files of this version will be combined into one program. This new release will assume that your system is working with the current versions so it can make assumptions about the format of your directories. It will also include various other goodies. Once I have some indication of support for my efforts (people become registered users), I will finish the new version and release it. ****************************************************************************** ADMIN: These programs in conjunction with STREW.EXE do almost all of your RBBS directory maintenance. To do your maintenance you simply type: MAINTAIN ALPHADIR DATEDIR where ALPHADIR is the name of your alphabetical master directory and DATEDIR is the name of you date-sorted master directory. DISCLAIMER: These utilities have no bugs that I know of (although you can easily produce some apparent bugs if you don't read this document carefully). They are sold without warranty of any kind. Use them at your own risk. THE FIRST TIME: Before you use these utilities, do a COPY DIR??.* DIR??.BAK (safety first). After you are COMPLETELY convinced that things are ok, you can delete the .BAK files. Then do the following: 1. Your directory headers, (if any) must have a character in the left-most column that has an ASCII value less than 48. The space, | * < > and : characters are all fine. If you have a header made of just text, the easiest solution is to use a text editor to insert a space at the beginning of each line. Other good choices for the first character are | and *. Otherwise your header will be sorted along with your filenames, and may be trashed by various of these utilities. 2. Your should run EXP.EXE on all your RBBS sub-directories if you want to use expanded filenames. Otherwise your filenames will become inconsistent. This only needs to be done once. 3. If you have used anything other than a "-" as a the delimiter in your dates, use a text editor to change to "-". 4. If your upload directory is not called DIR99, rename it to DIR99. 5. These utilities will behave unpredictably on files with Tabs in them. Remove all tabs before running any of these programs. Tabs are visible in FRED (although FRED tends to go crazy when you use it on files with tabs in them). 6. If you don't have master directories and would like them, do the following: COPY DIR10+DIR20+DIR30 MASTER (using the names of your files) You probably don't want to include DIR99. This file (MASTER) will have your headers at various points throughout. If you have multiple line descriptions of some files, you will need to do some work to prevent them from being split up or re-ordered during sorting. The easiest method is to eliminate them. If you feel you must have multiple line descriptions, you can preserve them by using the complete file name for each line and doing a little planning: FILE ASC description line1 FILE COM| description line2 FILE. COM| description line3 Notice the use of "|" to make sure they are sorted in the correct order. Another approach is to add the multiple line descriptions after you see how the lines will be sorted (making sure that your descriptions won't change the sort order). The solution is different for date-sorted directories. SYSRTRD.EXE sorts on the date and (if the dates are the same) on the right side of the line. Unless care is taken this may separate files you want to keep together. If you want to keep files with the same name together, sort the dir alphabetically before date-sorting it. Then make sure your multiple line description lines are in alphabetical order. The easiest way to do this is to space over each succeeding line: FILE ASC 01-01-85 description line one FILE COM 01-01-85 description line two FILE DOC 01-01-85 description line three USORT MASTER Using USORT.EXE will move up all your headers to the beginning of the file. For this reason USORT.EXE is not used in regular RBBS dir maintenance. USORT.EXE, unlike the other programs in this set, does not replace your infile but rather puts its output in a file with the same name but with the extension .SRT (e.g. MASTER.SRT). MASTER.SRT will have all the various headers from your RBBS sub-directories piled up at the beginning. You can then use an editor to remove them and add a new header for your master directory. Save two versions, one for your alphabetical dir one for your date-sorted dir, each with the appropriate header. (See #1 above for info about header.) Delete MASTER.* and then run SYSRTA.EXE and SYSRTRD.EXE on the two files. don't forget which is the date and which the alpha file. At this point you may have duplicate entries for some files (if they were listed in more than one RBBS sub-directory). You will need to use an editor to remove them. I hope to have a program that will do this for you in the near future (RMDUPES.EXE). These steps will only have to be done once. Once you have master directories, MAINTAIN.BAT will keep them up to date. Once you have done these, the utilities will take care of almost all of your RBBS Directory maintenance. WARNINGS: 1. The utilities have several expectations and may get a little crazy if they are not met. See the section above "THE FIRST TIME:" for a description of the necessary conditions. 2. The maximum file handled by these utilities is a little over 50k. VERY bad things could happen if you try to process a file larger than this. Future releases will exit gracefully if a file is too large. Be warned - this release will not. The batch file MAINTAIN.BAT will show you the file size before working on the file. Abort with CTRL-C if the file is too large. (This pause and warning occur only for your master file lists - it is assumed that your RBBS sub-directories are less than 50k.) 3. The dates in dir99 are the dates the files were uploaded. If these dates go in the sub-directories a while after they were uploaded, users who try to get a listing of new files with the N(ew) command will not hear about them if they called while the files were on dir99. The next release of these utilities will correct this by putting the current system date into each line of dir99 when the update is done. 4. The batch file uses dir0 as a temporary holding file for the dir99 header. If you have a dir0, either rename it or change the line in the batch file. It (the filename used by MAINTAIN.BAT) should have a "dir" prefix so you can "strew" to it. WHAT THE UTILITIES DO: The utilities DO NOT touch your dir headers as long as the first character of each line of the header has an ASCII value less than 48 (space . * | = + are all ok). The sort utilities SYSRTA.EXE and SYSRTRD.EXE report the number of files in each dir (ignoring the header, if any). 50k limit on file size. DON'T use them on larger files. The EXP.EXE program will automatically expand the filenames in a dir file so that all the extensions line up: FILE.EXE FILE.C FILENAME.DOC will change to FILE EXE FILE D FILENAME DOC The rest of the line will not be changed. STREW.EXE is a utility for sending dir99 entries to your RBBS sub-directories. It is not included in this set of utilities since I did not write it. Future releases of these utilities may have something like STREW built in. For now, the utilities will not work well without it and if you don't have it you can download it from the Terrapin Station RBBS (see hours and number above). Using STREW.EXE with these utilities is described below. SYSRTA.EXE is an alphabetical sort that ignores case and does not touch your dir header (if any). It sorts files in memory and will hold files up to 50k. Bad craziness may result if you try to sort a file larger than this. MAINTAIN.BAT will show you the file size and warn you about this. Use CTRL-C to abort if the file size is too big. If this file size is a problem there may be several solutions: 1. Use V. Buerg's sort filter (sortf.lbr available from Terrapin BBS). 2. Split the file into parts. 3. Wait for me or someone else to compile the utilities with a large memory model compiler. 4. Wait for me to write a program that will split the file into parts, perform the maintenance, then merge-sort it back to the master file (not likely to happen any time soon). 5. Punt. SYSRTRD.EXE sorts in reverse date order so the new files appear at the top of the list. SYSRTRD.EXE assumes that a "-" is used as the date separator. If you have used something else SYSRTRD.EXE will not work unless you use an editor to change to a '-'. SYSRTRD.EXE will behave unpredictably if another delimiter is used. SYSRTRD.EXE assumes the date is in standard MM-DD-YY form but is smart enough to put 01-01-85 above 09-09-84 and changes 1-20-85 to 01-20-85. 50k limit here too. GETHED.EXE extracts the header from dir99 and places it in a file called DIR99.HED. This is so DIR99.HED can be copied to DIR99 and DIR99.HED deleted at the end of the batch file. This leaves a new, empty DIR99 for new uploads. 50k file limit. USORT.EXE is a standard alphabetical sort utility except that it ignores upper and lower case. It DOES NOT ignore header material and therefore should not be used unless you want your header sorted in with the rest of your file. It is handy for sorting a book index or other alphabetical list where you want upper and lower case entries treated the same. Its use in creating a master directory the first time is described in the section above (THE FIRST TIME:). Another use for USORT would be to help get rid of the headers in a file with multiple headers spread through it. Usort would move them all to the front of the file where they could easily be removed. 50k file limit. MAINTAIN.BAT is the batch file that takes care of business for you. It is invoked with MAINTAIN ALPHADIR DATEDIR. Here is what it looks like: echo on cls rem RBBS File Maintenance Batch File rem . rem from Dr. Bob's Utilities rem . rem . rem call with MAINTAIN ALPHADIR DATEDIR rem where ALPHADIR is the name of your master alphabetical dir rem and DATEDIR is the name of your master date-sorted dir rem . rem e.g. MAINTAIN DIR90 DIR91 rem . pause exp dir99 copy dir99 dir99.bak gethed dir99 copy dir99.hed dir0 del dir99.hed strew rbbs sysrta dir10 dir20 dir30 ...put the names of your RBBS sub-directories here dir %1 pause ABORT IF SIZE of %1 is > 50,000 sysrta %1 dir %2 pause ABORT IF SIZE of %2 is > 50,000 sysrtrd %2 rename dir0 dir99 pause About to delete dir99.bak (abort with Ctrl-C) del dir99.bak rename dir0 dir99 CHANGING MAINTAIN.BAT MAINTAIN.BAT can be changed with edlin, FRED, or any ASCII oriented text editor. BE SURE TO CHANGE the line with DIR10 DIR20 DIR30 so that it contains the names of your RBBS sub-directories. You can use several lines if necessary as long as each starts with SYSRTA. If you would rather have your sub-directories in reverse date order, change sysrta to sysrtrd in the batch file. If you do not want to have a date-sorted directory, simply delete all lines with %2 in them and use MAINTAIN ALPHADIR to start up. (Replace "ALPHADIR" with the name of your dir.) If you do not want to have an alpha-sorted directory, delete all lines with %1 in them and change "%2" to "%1" wherever it appears. Use MAINTAIN DATEDIR to start up. (Replace "DATEDIR" with the name of your dir.) If you want all your RBBS sub-directories in reverse date order, use SYSRTRD.EXE to sort all of them. If you don't want the filename expanded, remove the line with exp. If you feel daring, remove the "PAUSE" statements USING STREW WITH THESE UTILITIES: STREW.EXE will let you specify RBBS-sub-directories to send the new files in dir99 to. Type C to configure strew and specify RBBS as the name of the config file. Specify DIR99 as the upload directory and specify the prefix for the RBBS sub-directories (usually DIR). IMPORTANT: specify the names of your two master directories, (or one if you only want one) as the default files to "strew" to. For example, if DIR90 and DIR91 are your two master directories, specify 90,91 as the default file to strew to and DIR as the default prefix. This will automatically append all the new files to the end of the two master directories. You may want to increase the size of the "strew" field in STREW if you will be "strewing" the file to several different directories. If you would like to leave some files in dir99 instead of sending them to RBBS sub-directories, simply "strew" them to dir0. Dir0 is a temporary file holding the dir99 header. It is later renamed to dir99. ABOUT THE SORT ALGORITHM: These utilities use a modified quicksort algorithm to sort the lines of each file. The lines are read into a continuous buffer and, as they are read, an array of pointers is set to point to the beginnings of the lines. The sort function calls the compare and swap functions. The swap function swaps the pointers to the two lines, leaving the lines where they are. The compare function is tailored to the particular sorting task. I'm not sure, but I think the quicksort is also modified to improve performance on a file which is already mostly sorted (as most RBBS files are). Future releases will probably have a single sort program which accepts flags on the command line that will determine its behavior. e.g. SYSORT /HRD DIR90 would sort DIR90 in reverse date order and ignore headers. WHAT'S LEFT FOR YOU TO DO: You will still have to tell STREW which directories to send the files to. MAINTAIN will take care of all the normal RBBS DIR maintenance I know of except that it does not update the message in your header (if any) giving the number of files and the date of revision. If everyone will agree to put a line like the following as line three of the header: * Contains ### Files - Last Update ##-##-##... * and let me know that this is ok, I will have the new version replace this line with the correct info. (It won't touch the border, it will just go to the third line, move over a few spaces and punch in the message with a few leading and trailing spaces for good measure.) EXAMPLE HEADER: ****************************************************************************** * Directory 90 - Lists all files * * Contains ### Files - Last Update ##-##-## * * Reverse Date Order * ****************************************************************************** have fun, Dr. Bob aka Bob Ray (leave Terrapin BBS messages for Bob Ray) ** see hours and number above ** *************************************************************************** ** see hours and number above ** ****************************************************