Hello, daring user! I hope you find this documentation easy to understand. It is a styled text document, which should be opened with Apple's SimpleText.
Before you start reading, remember : if there is anything you don't like about Disk Wizard, don't just throw it away - tell me (pottier@dmi.ens.fr). I'm open to all suggestions, and my programs will definitely benefit from your feedback!
What is Disk Wizard?
Disk Wizard is an advanced disk cataloging program. It is made up of two components: a system extension (Wizard INIT) and an application (Disk Wizard). Once it is installed, Disk Wizard automatically catalogs the contents of your removable volumes (floppy, CDs, whatever you wish). Thus, Disk Wizard's catalog is always up-to-date, without your needing to do any scanning chores. Disk Wizard will even see through Stuffit or Compact Pro archives if you wish.
At any time, you can launch the Disk Wizard application. In seconds, it will answer questions such as "Where did I put file X?" or "On what floppy can I store this 300K file?".
Installation
Disk Wizard requires System 7 or later. It has been tested with systems 7.0, 7.1 and 7.5.
Installing is easy: just put Wizard INIT into your Extensions folder. It will become active after you reboot your Mac. The Disk Wizard application can go anywhere on your disk; I suggest that you place an alias to it in your Apple Menu for quick access.
How it works
Every time you eject a disk, the Wizard notices it and scans its contents before ejecting it. It records the data into a special folder located within your Preferences folder. You will notice that ejecting a disk takes longer than before; the more files there are on the disk, the longer. Disk Wizard recognizes disks based on their name only: you must ensure that every disk has a unique name, otherwise you will confuse the program. The simplest way is to use numbers as names.
Here are a few things you should know:
• Holding the Option key while ejecting a disk will force Disk Wizard to ignore it. The catalog data won't be updated, but you will gain time.
• The disk won't be scanned if its contents weren't modified since you last inserted it. Note that opening/closing Finder windows causes the Finder to write some information to the disk, which causes the disk to be scanned again.
• If you rename a disk, Disk Wizard notices it and renames the corresponding entry in its catalog.
Using Disk Wizard
Windows
When you launch the Disk Wizard application, it reads the catalog from your hard disk and displays it. The main window, called "Volumes", displays the list of all volumes. Each volume has its own window, which you can bring up by double-clicking on a volume name (or selecting View Contents from the Volumes menu).
In every window, you can select items by clicking on them. Shift-clicking selects a range, and command-clicking adds or removes a single line to/from the current selection. This should be the behavior you're used to.
If you wish to hide some of the columns (for instance, the files' creation dates), click in upper right corner of the window. A popup menu will appear; it lets you select which columns should be visible and which should be hidden.
The list displayed by the volume window can be sorted according to the data contained in any column; that is, by name, free space, capacity, number of files, creation date or modification date. To change the sorting criterion, just click on the column name. The active criterion is underlined.
These settings will be saved across invocations of Disk Wizard.
Menus
The Main menu contains important commands. Find File and Find Next are described later, in a section of their own. Same thing applies for Preferences. Quit justs quits Disk Wizard, of course.
The Volumes menu is active when you have selected volumes in the Volumes window. Selecting Forget Volumes clears all selected volumes from the database; use it with caution, as no confirmation dialog will appear. Choosing View Contents will display the contents of the selected disks (each disk has its own window). You can double-click as a shortcut.
The Items menu is active when you have selected files in a disk window. The Select in Finder command will bring the Finder to the front and make it display the selected files. It will ask you to insert the right disk first if necessary. This feature is very useful to quickly locate relevant files without digging into the folder hierarchy by hand. Double-clicking the selection has the same effect as Select in Finder.
The Fetch command will copy the selected files or folders from the disk to a place which you specify. When you select this menu, Disk Wizard first asks you to select a destination folder; then, it asks you to insert the right disk, if necessary. Finally, it copies the selected items. Double-clicking while holding the option key has the same effect as Fetch.
Note: using Fetch is recommended over using Select in Finder and then copying files by hand. There are two reasons: first, Disk Wizard copies files faster than the Finder, which is a real hog as far as copying is concerned. Second, Fetch only reads from the disk, whereas selecting files in the Finder will open the disk's windows, which modifies the disk's contents. As a result, with the latter method, the disk will be scanned again when you eject it, which wastes time.
Note: selecting a folder alone and choosing Fetch copies the folder and its contents. If you select a folder and part (or all) of its contents, Disk Wizard will notice it and will still make only one copy of the folder.
Searching
Searching is Disk Wizard's main purpose. Using its search facilities, you can locate a file in seconds, even if you have hundreds of floppy disks. Select Find File from the Main menu to bring the Search dialog to the front. This dialog looks like the Finder's Find dialog. There's a text field which allows you to enter a search string. The Case sensitive check box specifies whether case differences should be taken into account when searching. The first popup menu (does/does not) allows you to apply a logic NOT to the search criterion. Finally, the second popup menu lets you specify whether the search string should be a part of/the beginning/the end of the file name. The match pattern setting is for advanced users; it allows you to specify a regexp (regular expression) against which the file name should be matched. Regular expressions are described at the end of this file.
Once you have chosen your search criterion, click Find First (or hit the Return key) to start searching. Disk Wizard will select the first matching item and bring the window it is in to the front. If you wish to continue searching, choose Find Next from the Main menu, hit Cmd-G, or click Find Next in the Search dialog. If no items are found, Disk Wizard will beep.
Preferences
Selecting Preferences from the Main menu brings up the Preferences dialog. It is divided into four parts.
• The first part allows you to set up an exclusion list. Volumes whose names appear in this list will be ignored by Disk Wizard. This is useful if you often use temporary volumes with names like "Untitled", "Junk", "Temporary". It is also useful to avoid cataloging a disk whose contents don't interest you, for example an Audio CD, or a CD which contains a single game made of many files, like MYST.
• The second part allows to you to choose the font and size for all windows.
• The third part lets you tell Disk Wizard whether Stuffit and Compact Pro should be scanned. If you choose to scan them, these archives will look like folders in the displayed hierarchy. Files contained within an archive are displayed in italics to show that they don't actually exist on the disk. The ability to scan compressed archives is a cool feature, I think; however, by turning it off, you will save time (scanning will be faster) and hard disk space (the catalog files will be smaller).
• The last part lets you choose which drives should be scanned. For instance, if you have a floppy disk drive and a SyQuest drive, you might want to catalog only floppies. All you have to do is to deselect your SyQuest drive. By the way, double-clicking is necessary to select/deselect a drive (small interface quirk, sorry). Note that drives are identified by their number; for instance, your internal floppy drive is #1. If there is a disk inside the drive, the disk name will be displayed to help you identify the drive; otherwise, only the number is available.
Information window
Selecting Information from the Windows menu will bring up a small window with a few figures. It tells you the number of disks Disk Wizard knows about; the total numbers of files and folders on them (including files contained inside compressed archives); the amount of memory currently used by Disk Wizard; the amount of remaining memory inside Disk Wizard's partition.
Speed and memory
If you have many files, and especially if you have CD-ROMs, you will find that the catalog data can grow quickly. The average is a few kilobytes for a floppy disk, 800 kilobytes for a CD. Since I didn't want Disk Wizard to be a memory hog, I implemented a lazy memory management scheme : data is read from disk only when it is needed, and it is released when it isn't any more. This makes Disk Wizard a bit slower (compared to reading all data when starting up), but it allows it to run even when little memory is available.
How to set the partition size for Disk Wizard ? Well, I'd say that 384k should be enough if you have only floppies. If you have CDs or other large volumes, you may want to increase its partition size to 2 or 4 megabytes. Anyway, the more memory you give it, the faster it will be. If Disk Wizard doesn't have enough memory, it will quit rather politely with a -108 error.
Note that the first time you search for a filename, Disk Wizard reads a lot of data from disk; this is because of its "lazy" strategy. The next searches will be faster because they hopefully won't need to access the disk as often.
You may copy and give away this software freely, as long as the present documentation remains bundled with it. You may include it in CD-ROMs or other shareware collections, provided that acquiring the collection doesn't remove the user's obligation to register the software. A complimentary CD would be appreciated.
This software is not free - if, after a trial period of a few weeks, you decide to keep it, you must register by sending me $10. Please send only US dollars or French francs, in cash. Please NO CHEQUES (my bank asks for more than $10 to cash a $10 check!)
Registering gives you the right to use the software, including any future versions. Registered users will be sent new versions as soon as they are released, provided that they can be reached by e-mail from Internet. I won't send updates by regular mail (it would take too much time). I will strive to provide registered users with full support : that is, fix the bugs they encounter and add the features they request.
Note that I didn't turn this software into "crippleware": it is fully functional, which allows you to use it without waiting for a registration code. Please don't abuse it, remember to register. Just put a $10 bill into an envelope with your address and a few words, and that's it! Please remember to include your e-mail address if you have one. Also, please make it clear that you're registering for Disk Wizard (I have another shareware app, Décor - ask me about it!)
Drop me a mail if you want to discuss site licenses. I'm usually very reasonable.
Here's my snail mail address :
M. François Pottier
4 rue Colette
94210 LA VARENNE
FRANCE
You can use Disk Wizard's Edit menu to copy this address to the clipboard.
Contacting the author
If you experience any problems with Disk Wizard, you can send me e-mail at pottier@dmi.ens.fr, on Internet (you can use Disk Wizard's Edit menu to copy this address to the clipboard). I will do my best to fix all reported bugs.
Also, if you think Disk Wizard lacks some features, tell me! Many suggestions end up integrated into the next versions. Without bragging, I think my online support is quite good. Of course I'm more inclined to support registered users...
When you report a bug, please give me the following information:
- what version of Disk Wizard you are using
- if Disk Wizard displays an error message, which one, and which error code.
- if Disk Wizard crashes into Macsbug, a log would be useful. Here's how to make one:
+ Type "log <filename>", where <filename> is any name to be used for the log file
+ Type "ip; sc6; sc7; log"
+ Then try "es" to return to the Finder, or "rb" to reboot
Macsbug sometimes creates the file in weird places, so you may have to use the
Finder's Find command to locate it.
Also, feel free to drop me a mail if you want to suggest enhancements, ask questions, etc.
Obtaining the latest version
The latest version of Disk Wizard is usually available from the large Internet ftp sites such as sumex-aim.stanford.edu or mac.archive.umich.edu.
You can also get it through my Mosaic home page, as well as my other shareware apps. The URL is http://acacia.ens.fr:8080/home/pottier/index.html.
Finally, you can send some email to me. I'll put you on my beta testers list if you wish, and you'll be the first to get new versions before the world knows about them.
Version History
1.0 :
First released version.
1.0.1 :
Fixed a severe bug in the INIT which caused problems with Norton Utilities, with various foreign file systems (audio CDs, ISO 9660 CDs, DOS disks), and possibly with lots of other software too.
1.0.2 :
Fixed an oversight which prevented Disk Wizard from running on machines without Color QuickDraw.
1.0.3 :
Some interface changes to work better on 9" screens.
Revved the docs.
Fixed a bug which could cause a crash when ejecting volumes the first time Disk Wizard was installed.
Planned Improvements
There are many problems I know about:
- Some drives refuse to appear in the drive list.
- Disk Wizard will quit rather abruptly if it runs out of memory.
- Stuffit 1.5.1 archives are not analyzed correctly.
I hope to fix these problems in version 2.0, which will be a complete rewrite with numerous improvements. Among the planned new features are
- Cool Finder-like interface
- Fast batch search dialog
- Ability to export catalogs to text files
- Ability to search for duplicates
- Ability to scan fixed drives
- Accelerated for PowerPC
and much more! Stay tuned...
Acknowledgements
Thanks to...
Henry Spencer at U of T for the regexp code.
Jim Luther of DTS for the MoreFiles library.
James W. Walker for the ShowIcon7 code.
... and everybody who sent me letters! Thanks to you shareware is a cool hobby!
Appendix: Regular expression syntax
Here's the definition of a regular expression. This is intended as a reminder, not an explanation; it will be somewhat steep if you never heard about regexps before.
A regular expression (sometimes called pattern) is a condensed representation of a set of strings. The strings in this set are said to be matches for the regular expression ; others are said to be rejected by the regexp. For instance, the regular expression '\.c$' matches all strings ending in '.c'.
A regular expression is zero or more branches, separated by `|'. It matches anything that matches one of the branches.
A branch is zero or more pieces, concatenated. It matches a match for the first, followed by a match for the second, etc.
A piece is an atom possibly followed by `*', `+', or `?'. An atom followed by `*' matches a sequence of 0 or more matches of the atom. An atom followed by `+' matches a sequence of 1 or more matches of the atom. An atom followed by `?' matches a match of the atom, or the null string.
An atom is a regular expression in parentheses (matching a match for the regular expression), a range (see below), `.' (matching any single character), `^' (matching the null string at the beginning of the input string), `$' (matching the null string at the end of the input string), a `\' followed by a single character (matching that character), or a single character with no other significance (matching that character).
A range is a sequence of characters enclosed in `[]'. It normally matches any single character from the sequence. If the sequence begins with `^', it matches any single character not from the rest of the sequence. If two characters in the sequence are separated by `-', this is shorthand for the full list of ASCII characters between them (e.g. `[0-9]' matches any decimal digit). To include a literal `]' in the sequence, make it the first character (following a possible `^'). To include a literal `-', make it the first or last character.
