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SCAN.DOC
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1986-09-18
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2KB
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66 lines
Scan -- Courtesy of
Dr. Bob's Utilities
444 Maple lane
St. Paul, MN 55126
Scan is not warranted in any way although it seems safe enough to me.
Scan displays the ASCII portions of any file. It ignores leading spaces,
isolated punctuation, leading digits, and ascii string less than 4
characters long. The idea is to give you a quick look at the ASCII
messages in a file without showing you a lot of garbage. Ignoring
strings less than 4 characters long still gives you some garbage and
occasionally skips things you might like to see but it seems to be
a fair compromise.
Scan may be useful in guessing at undocumented features of .com
and .exe programs (like printing 'ARF ARF -- GOT YOU' after formatting
your hard drive).
It's also fun to scan commercial programs (especially Microsoft's)
looking for unusual messages. WordPerfect 4.1 is a trip -- it includes
things like "There are no phonetic rules for this language." (in case
aliens from outer space try to run the spelling checker),
and one lengthy message about how you've probably lost all your work
and may have to reboot.
Command.com is also interesting:
"Intermediate file error during pipe"
"Cannot do binary reads from device"
although some of the messages are truncated because the high bit is set
on some characters a la WordStar.
Of course scan can also be used to read a text file although LIST is
probably a better choice since it is faster and allows paging backwards.
Scan shows the data continuously.
Redirection is supported so you can use:
SCAN *.EXE > REPORT
and then browse through REPORT at your leisure.
Enjoy -- Dr. Bob
Use CTRL S to pause
CTRL C to abort
Modified 3/4/86 Now accepts wildcards. Does not clear screen.
Modified 9/17/86 Now allows scanning a file on another disk.
***
You can usually find Bob Ray at Terrapin Station DBBS.
A Programmers BBS 612/623-0152 1200/2400 24 hours a day!
***