The enclosed FSP Script is the one I currently use on the Black Diamond BBS. I making it available for SS Sysops who want to use FSP but can't figure out how.
Background:
(Please excuse the literary plagiarism from Maria Langer)
I wanted to use FSP, but couldn't figure out how, so I took the time to file request Maria Langer's FSP script package from the Electronic Pen. These scripts contain original code from both her scripts as well as Mike Bielen's NJMUG scripts. (thanks guy's and gal's)
As my BBS evolved I added a very large harddrive (1 gig) and chose to keep ALL files available without a yearly delete option. We'll needless to say as time went on I didn't exceed the capacity of my hard drive (at least not yet), but I did exceed the capacity of the combined files section, which is a listing of all files available here on the Black Diamond. (1600 files)
What was happening, was not only did I exceed the number of entries that TidE could handle, but I also exceeded the reasonable amount of RAM memory I could assign to FSP to handle such a large section without running out of memory on my Mac+.
I could live with the exceeding of entries for TidE. I just used fileEdit. Although not as convenient as TidE, I could still access the combined file section with FileEdit. This was no big deal at first as I rarely had a need to look at the combined file section except from within SS itself.
But alas trying to allocate 1000K to FSP on a Mac+ plus was surely not going to work if I expected to keep all files on the system available, process them with FSP and also have free memory on a Mac+ with the launch.next feature.
I also was never really happy with a plain text file of FILES and NEWFILES without some type of section by section separation to make them easier to read by section area's by the user.
My solution?
I decided to rewrite the FSP scripts to create multiple section text file listings and combined them later with Concat-o-magic. This allowed me to set a lower RAM allocation for FSP in the Finder. The drawback was that processing time would be increased.
On my Mac+ with a Brainstorm accelerator, this amounts to about 45 minutes to process ALL nightly maintenance functions of file sections. For the ease of maintenance and the lack of workload for me I decided I could live with the system being down 45 minutes to do the maintenance functions automatically.
I now have more readable text file listings and don't have to worry about memory allocation problems with FSP.
One major drawback, The combined section file cannot be sorted after new entries are made, because you have to load all entries, unless you allocate more memory to FSP, FSP crashes. The solution?, I made a FLAG definition in the main control file, reset it to YES and save it, allocate more memory to FSP and then run stand-alone. The main file will automatically sense this flag and sort the combined file. Be sure to reset the flag and the memory allocation before automatic operations are resumed.
My users use the combined file mainly for search's so ordering is not big deal and can be adjusted weekly/manually.
I have separated the scripts into several files to make them easier to understand and FSP uses the CHAIN command to run them.
You must acquire concat-o-Magic and set up several copy's of concat-o-magic along with data files to merge the resultant text files. Just use glider's or Tabby launch.next's to run everything together! (The data files for Concat-o-magic are included, but not concat-o-magic).
Good Luck!
Disclaimer
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Neither I nor anyone listed above will take responsibility for any lost data resulting from use of these scripts! Use the scripts at your own risk!
Credits
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Tom Konatz, author of FSP. Pay your shareware fee's!
