Current Shareware 1994 January/SHAR194.ISO/email/dove0793.zip/CUNBATCH.DOC

Text File | 1992-05-11 | 4KB | 68 lines

Documentation for CUNBATCH.EXE

Many users of DoveMail will NOT need this program at all.  You need it only
if your feed is sending you compressed batched newsgroups that begin with the
12 characters "#! cunbatch<LF>" (where <LF> is a linefeed character).  Since
MS-DOS versions of COMPRESS aren't smart enough to ignore this header when
decompressing a file, they think the file isn't really a compressed file and
refuse to uncompress it.  All that CUNBATCH does is to strip off the "#!
cunbatch<LF>" header from every file conforming to the filespec you specify
in the command line, assumimg that the file actually contains the header.
You can also reverse the process and ADD a header to files that don't already
have one, though I imagine that VERY few people will have a need to do that.
In either case, CUNBATCH.EXE checks first to see if the file already has the
header and acts appropriately (it won't add a header to a file that already
has one, and it won't delete anything from a file that does not have the
header.

New feature:  You can optionally shell to COMPRESS from within CUNBATCH, in
order to force COMPRESS to deal with batched newsgroup files one at a time
(note, however, that this requires additional memory, so if you are
multitasking in a tight memory situation you may need to run CUNBATCH first
and then run COMPRESS separately).

There are only three possible file line switches, one of which is required
and two of which are not.  The usage is:

Cunbatch -f[drive:][path]FILEMASK [-a] [-c[drive:\path]COMPRESS.EXE[_switches]]

Specify the filemask (wildcards may be used) and optionally the drive and/or
pathspecs after the -f switch.

Use the optional -a switch to ADD "#! cunbatch" header to files that do not
already have it (the default is to REMOVE the header from files that DO have
it).

Use the optional -c switch to shell to a compression program after adding or
removing the header from each file.  This will force processing of files in
datestamp order.  Use the underscore characters to replace spaces in the
compressor invocation line - for example, a typical invocation line would be:

     CUNBATCH -fINFILE.DZ -cC:\UTIL\COMPRESS.EXE_-dfv

The -c switch allows you to shell to an external program (such as COMPRESS)
only *AFTER* the "c" header is removed (or added), and it is only usable
where the the name of the file to be acted upon is the last item in the
called program's invocation line.  It is intended specifically for calling
the COMPRESS program while unpacking compressed newsgroup files, and may not
be too useful in other situations.  Also, you MUST include the FULL DRIVE and
PATH specifications (if not in the "current" directory) and EXTENSION (e.g.
".EXE") of the compression program called using the -c switch.  If -c switch
is not used, Cunbatch will not attempt to shell to the compression program.

Cunbatch needs as much free space on the hard drive as is used by the
original file (plus 12 bytes if you're adding a header).  It will check to
see if this much free space is available and will skip any files that are too
large to process.  Compress then won't uncompress them and DoveMail will
ignore them, so you can recover from this error later.

Possible error codes that may be returned are:

0 - No errors
1 - Bad path given on command line
2 - Unexpected error (some files may have been processed)
3 - Error in calling compressor program (some files may have been processed)
4 (or higher) indicates that processing failed on one or more files due to
lack of disk space.  6 indicates both a lack of disk space and some other
error.  In either case, some files may have been processed already.