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EDDY.WHY
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1991-03-20
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|-------------------------------|
| EDDY (TM) |
| File and Directory Editor |
| Copyright(C) 1987 thru 1991 |
| by John Scofield |
| All rights reserved |
|-------------------------------|
WHY USE EDDY?
EDDY, a shareware program modestly billed as the "World's Greatest Disk
Utility!", lets you do whatever you want with your files, directories
and disks, and minimizes the keystrokes needed to do it. Most of EDDY's
capabilities aren't new. However, the range and diversity of capabil-
ities are seldom (nowhere else?) found in a single program.
The current EDDY is a greatly-improved version of the program reviewed
in the July, 1987 issue of "Computer Language" magazine. Some quotes
from that review by Tim Parker...
"The interface ... is elegant."
"...clean, easy-to-use, well-written program."
"...quality of product we've seen from Peter Norton."
EDDY has an intuitive, convenient interface for the common operations,
such as disk/directory/file management, file viewing, etc. There are
also some things that you can do easily with EDDY that are difficult, if
possible at all, with other utilities.
EDDY has the latest, up-to-date, "buzzword" features, too:
- Prune and Graft
- Point and Shoot
- Configurability
- LAN support
- Context-sensitive HELP
- (and of course, "user friendliness" and "ease of use")
EDDY also supports 43- or 50-line mode on an EGA or VGA screen, and
other monitors with up to 66 lines.
Complete understanding of the examples below may require using EDDY, or
(horrors!) reading some of the User's Manual (in EDDY.DOC). However, I
hope these will interest you enough to give EDDY a try.
Consider...
- When you have a long list of files that you want to process (say, you
want to PRINT the .LST files and TASM the .ASM files), and you don't
want to type in the commands one-by-one, the normal thing to do is build
a multi-line batch file (or one with "FOR" statements) and execute it.
With EDDY it's easier; just display the directory containing the files,
tell EDDY to "Ignore" the ones you're not interested in (one keypress
each), and use EDDY's multi-file point-and-shoot capability.
- Have you ever installed a new package and wondered what it was doing
to your disk (watching the "busy" light blink), and then been unable to
find the new or changed files? Many programs create "hidden" files, in
directories of their choice, on your disk. You can find them by using
EDDY's "Where's That File?" function combined with attribute filtering.
If you enter:
eddy/w +H
EDDY will search the whole disk for hidden files.
- Or maybe you'd like to know whether any new files were created or any
of your files were changed by the program you just ran at (say) 9 PM on
Sep. 14, 1988. If you enter:
eddy/w ">09/14/88 08:59p"
EDDY will find the files, wherever they are, hidden or not.
- You don't have to worry any more whether you should be copying files
from A: to B:, or from B: to A:, nor whether there's room for all the
files you want to copy. EDDY will tell you if there's not enough room
before starting the copying, and warn you before copying a newer file
over an older one.
- Did you ever lose a file because your only copy was on a disk that
somehow developed a "bad spot", and couldn't be read? With EDDY's COPY
command, you can at least save all the GOOD data that's left, leaving
out only the part of the file that's actually in the "bad" sector. So
you don't have to key in all that data or text again!
- Want to know the differences between two directories? EDDY will TELL
you, not just display the directories for you to compare to one another.
EDDY will report whether a file is in the other directory or not; if it
is, the relation between the timestamps - newer, older, same, or even
same timestamp but different size - will be displayed as well. You can
stop to look at either file's contents, compare the two files, copy,
move, patch or delete them, and then continue on with the next file.
More...
- You can also do the directory comparisons, and file copying, deleting,
etc., based on the results of those comparisons, in batch mode. Great
for routine backups and directory cleanups!
- EDDY's string-finding capabilities are powerful and easy to set up.
You can find strings in one or more files (including binary files) -
even hyphenated words continued from one line to the next - and you can
use strings with a mixture of hex and ASCII if you want. There's also a
similarly powerful "FIND and REPLACE" capability.
- Tired of wasting paper because of the form feed that many programs put
on their output? If you use DOS's PRINT command to print a series of
files, you get a blank page between each one. To avoid this, use EDDY's
PATCH command to breeze through all the files, changing that initial
form feed to a space, or deleting it entirely. No more wasted paper!
- Have you ever wanted to read or modify a file of text that was created
by WordStar (tm), but that's not the word processor you use? Hard to
work with, wasn't it? Well, with EDDY, you can not only read it easily
on the screen, but you can convert it to pure ASCII, so you can use your
favorite editor or word processor on it if you want.
- Would you like to send entire disks by modem, rather than just files?
EDDY lets you copy an entire disk - boot sector, FAT, directories and
all - to a file. You can then compress the file, send it, and the
receiver can recreate an exact copy of that disk (assuming he has a copy
of EDDY, too!).
- You can chop bytes off the front or back of any file and you can add
bytes - for example, ^Zs - at the end of any file. Or you can expand
all TAB characters in a file to the equivalent number of spaces (0 - 8,
as you choose).
- If you're running short of space on disk, even the amount of space
used by the subdirectories themselves can be significant. A directory
always keeps all space that was ever allocated to it, even if all the
files have been deleted. EDDY will tell you how much space your
directories occupy, if you turn on option /D.
-----------------------------
If you know of programs that do things easier or better than EDDY,
please let me know, so I can stop making dubious claims (or maybe
improve EDDY). On the other hand, if you find some more neat things to
do with the program, or have any ideas for enhancements, I'd like to
hear about them, too.