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Night Owl 6
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Night Owl's Shareware - PDSI-006 - Night Owl Corp (1990).iso
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timechk.zip
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TIMECHEK.DOC
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1988-10-24
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4KB
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TIMECHEK.EXE v1.0
by
Mike Janke, Kendall BBS (1:135/4)
TIMECHEK is 100% free of charge and carries absolutely no guarantee of
any kind. If it breaks something, you get to keep both pieces.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks go to David Kerley (135/24) for the pascal knowledge he shared
with this beginner pascal programmer (this is my first pascal program!).
WHAT IT IS
Vernon Six called me one day and asked... "Do you know of a program
that will downgrade/upgrade a user's security level and/or flags on a
certain date?". "Nah", says I, "But I can probably come up with
something like that".
Sure enough, a few days later, TIMECHEK emerged. I personally have no
use for such a program, so testing has been difficult, but it seems to
work as I (and Vern) wanted it to work.
This program would be used by someone that runs a subscription type of
system (I guess). A user pays X amount for so many months access and
at the end of that time, TIMECHEK does whatever you say to his/her
security level/access flags. TIMECHEK does NOT delete (or flag as
deleted) anyone... at least not intentionally! You could let TIMECHEK
set their access level to zero, and this is almost as good as deleting
the user, but their record would not be purged during a USERPACK.
TIMECHEK modifies a user with a "target" date less than the current
date. That means you don't have to run this every single day. Once a
week should be sufficient unless you are really picky about snagging
that user exactly on the day his time has run out.
I haven't tried it with a full 500 line control file, but I can't
imagine TIMECHEK taking more than 30 seconds to complete it's task
even when running with a full load. So, a daily run shouldn't be that
much trouble.
CHANGES SINCE Version 0.7
TIMECHEK is now in Turbo Pascal 4.0 instead of QuickBasic 4.0. This
has not greatly increased the program's speed, but it's a WHOLE LOT
smaller now. 14k in Turbo Pascal vs. 48k in QuickBasic for the same
program.
TIMECHEK will end with an errorlevel of 0 if all goes ok, otherwise,
it'll drop out with an errorlevel of 1. If you run this in your
morning event batch file, you can trap this so you'll know of any
problems.
HOW TO USE IT AND LIMITATIONS
TIMECHECK is executed in your QuickBBS home directory and has two
command line parameters; the name of the control file containing the
info it needs and an optional switch to tell TIMECHEK to comment out
(rather than remove) a users name from the control file. See the
enclosed TIMECHEK.CTL for a sample of what this control file looks
like and its format. If you use the filename TIMECHECK.CTL for your
control filename, the command line would be...
TIMECHEK TIMECHEK.CTL
If you wanted TIMECHEK to comment out a Users name instead of just
removing it from the control file, the command line would look like
this...
TIMECHEK TIMECHEK.CTL -C
This is useful for those that don't mind maintaining the control file
manually and would like to see a user name commented out and then know
that they have in fact been downgraded by TIMECHEK.
The mention of 'maintaining' the control file brings up one of the
limitations. The control file can have 500 LINES MAXIMUM. This means
that if you don't fill the control file with comments, you have room
for 500 user names for TIMECHEK to check up on. This should be more
than enough... no?
Other limitations? Not too many. You MUST supply the name of the
control file THEN the optional -C switch if you want to use the
switch.
Control file format is explained fully in the sample control flie.
TIMECHECK DOES MODIFY USERS.BBS. Please check this program out
thoroughly before unleashing it on your USERS. I have tested it to
the best of my ability, but again, since I don't run this type of
system, I can't just go around downgrading my users just to test this
over a long period of time.
Enjoy.
Mike Janke 1:135/4
Voice (305) 271-0438
BBS (305) 271-2146