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Text File | 1984-09-27 | 15.6 KB | 340 lines

********************* * UTIL Version 2.0 * ********************* **FIRST** Yes, UTIL is user supported software, and yes, I do encourage you to copy and distribute the program. BUT.... cor- porate users should consider this commercial software... I will take and process invoices, and one "contribution" per company is hardly acceptable! I will gladly accept invoices! This edition of the documentation (version 2.0) has been changed around so that it is more amenable to sending partial documenta- tion updates. This will reduce the required cost of future up- dates. Full documentation is currently costing me more than the disk and mailing combined. Thank you for your interest in program UTIL. I sincerely hope that you can put it to good use, and that it will save you many hours in time. If you cannot use it, perhaps a friend can. UTIL is most useful when kept on RAM disk. It is of the greatest benefit to users with hard disks, but can be used effectively by any IBM PC owner. If you do not have either a RAM disk or a hard disk, you will probably not find UTIL of as great use, due to the size of the file, and the time it takes to load from floppy. If you are a patient person, though, you may still find it useful. What is in This File This README file exists to allow you to quickly come up to speed on what is new in UTIL. If you have one of the older versions of the program, you should be able to come up to speed quickly on what has been added to the program since the version you have. This way, you won't have to reread the entire documentation. Versions of the program are listed from earliest to latest, so that the updates read in chronological order. Merely start at the version you currently have, and read forward. VERSION 1.3 Version 1.3 fixes many bugs found in earlier versions of the program. Due to a rush to release the program, many options were not tested as thouroughly as they should have been. I had the program out to several people for Beta test, but they apparently did not exercise several of the options in the program. VERSION 1.4 Version 1.4 incorporates many new features from previous ver- sions, and fixes a few bugs. These are described below. Return to UTIL At the request of several users, I have added the ability to automatically return to UTIL in several ways. See the new documentation sections under SD relating to alt-E and alt- W. Hitting F3 is now an alternate to ESC, and will cause you to return to DOS, then reexecute UTIL. H Option In SD, the H option has been added. Check the documentation. Renaming Files In SD, the alt-R option has been added. This option allows you to rename a file. You are prompted for what to rename the file to. Find Option In SD, the F option has been added, which will search the file for a user supplied substring. File Size In SD, the size (in bytes) of the file the cursor is pointing to is displayed. File size was not displayed in earlier versions. ESC Everywhere in UTIL that a prompt is given, hitting ESC will cause you to leave that option. This was not true in earlier ver- sions. Environment New environment variables have been added. The are UT*RD and UT*NA. Check with Appendix A to see what these do, and how to use them. DO$$$.BAT The annoying DO$$$.BAT file, which is created by UTIL to build and execute intermediate processing, can be put on RAM disk, which results in faster operation, and does not clutter up your directories. See Appendix A for RAM disk mode of operation (UT*RD). Bug in L Option When users used the L option of SD, it was immediately switching directories, and for- getting to check for files flagged for dele- tion, copying, and special processing. This has been repaired. Speed The SD option of UTIL has been sped up. This was done by adding more intelligence to SD, especially regarding the reading of the volume label and the determination of bytes available on the disk. Documentation Several errors in the documentation were fixed. You would be well advised to reread the documentation, especially if you had an earlier version of the program, and there were some things you couldn't figure out how to do. Appendices Appendices have been added to attempt to help users in utilizing UTIL most effectively. VERSION 1.5 Bug Fix Users were experiencing excellent to poor response times to requests in the SD option of UTIL. This bug was traced and repaired. In fixing this bug, another bug was fixed in the handling of environment variables (this was actually a SERIOUS error). Screen Copy If UTIL is invoked with the SC (screen copy) option, the current screen being viewed is copied to the other screen. This option is only useful if you have two displays, of course. New SD Options f2,f4,f6,f8 and f10 are used to move the cursor in 3 entry increments within the current column. Home returns you to the very first screen of a directory listing End takes you to the very last screen of a directory listing - will give you an inverse date sort, wherein the latest entries will be shown first. / followed by a letter positions the cursor over the first file beginning with that letter if you are viewing an alpha sort. If you are viewing an exten- sion sort, the cursor will go to the first file beginning with that exten- sion. Global undo has been added as an option to the global function. Merely hit * (to get the global prompt) followed by alt- U. F1 or alt-H brings up a help menu in SD. The number of available options probably warrants this. Due to the number of options available, the help screen is rather abbreviated. If it is not enough to jog your memory, consult the documen- tation. VERSION 1.6 Size & Speed Recompiled program with version 2.1 C com- piler from Computer Innovations. This change alone shrunk the size of the UTIL.EXE file by almost 9K bytes. UTIL is also significantly faster, since the I/O code generated by the new compiler is much better. Environment Another item can be put into the environment... UT*OP (OP for options). Cur- rently, only one option is available, which is to display directories in lower case, rather than the default of upper case. Color support Color monitors are now supported in COLOR. Also, a few minor bugs related to the color monitor were fixed (specifically, problems with the cursor). Display Sort The sort type is displayed under the SD option of UTIL. Remember sort The directory sort mode is remembered when switching around directories. Specify sort You can now specify the sort you desire upon invocation of UTIL. BROWSE features A couple of bugs in the BROWSE feature were fixed. Added to the BROWSE were the ability to send (or append) the marked portion of text to a disk file rather than the printer. COPY anywhere The COPY operation is now done inside of UTIL. It is very fast... almost as fast as DOS can do it. Additionally, you can copy files ANYWHERE! FIND option Additionally, an option was added in the SD option of UTIL. When using the FIND command to search a file for a character string, you may hit <ENTER> to tell FIND to look for the same character string you looked for on the last invocation of FIND. Give the <ENTER> in response to the prompt after hitting "F" to invoke FIND. TYPE buffered The TYPE option (type directly to printer) now buffers each line before sending it to the printer. Earlier versions sent each character as it was typed, which left little room for errors. VERSION 1.61 Minor update... only sent out to a couple of people. VERSION 1.62 New Browse Option While browsing a file, you can hit "S" to copy the screen you are viewing to the other screen (provided you have two monitors, of course). New Option Under UT*OP (see above, version 1.6), you may also specify a "BW" option. Use this option if you have a non-color monitor driven by the color card. A couple of users had this set up, and the color commands sent out by UTIL were creating unreadable displays on a non- color monitor. By setting UT*OP=BW in the environment, color commands are inhibited. More Options Since multiple options have been added to the UT*OP environment variable, I am well advised to clue you in on how to specify multiple options. All you have to do is put a comma between the options in the SET command! For example, you might say SET UT*OP=LC,BW. Tab Expansion There was a bug in the tab expansion routine used by BROWSE. This has been fixed. Version 2.0 Help Windows On many of the options, help windows now pop up automatically in reverse video in the center of the screen. This gives you more info than the terse 1 line prompt. Apply commands You may now supply any commands to be ex- ecuted on files. SC to a file Screen copy can now be done to a file Stay in subdir You may now exit UTIL, and remain in the subdirectory you were viewing. = Hitting = in will cause the last command to be repeated. Cursor jumps After hitting several of the alt keys in , the cursor automatically jumps down to the next file in the list. SD filespec You can now give the SD option of UTIL a filespec to cut down on how much directory info you have to look at. This also greatly speeds up the display. (e.g. UTIL SD \LIBR\*.c) PIPE option UTIL can now act as a DOS pipe "filter" for the output of DIR or TREE, allowing you to apply a number of programs to a number of files or subdirectories. For example, to run JET (a program from Tall Trees) to back up your hard disk, do the following: TREE | UTIL PIPE pause Backing up $ ^ jet $ /d/era ^ CHMOD From the DOS prompt, you may run with the CHMOD option to change the file mode of disk files (e.g. make a file hidden, or read-only) Browse changes You can now do a screen copy in BROWSE. BROWSE now shows the name of the file being browsed, and can send a TOF to the printer. Handling of writing text to files has been enhanced. Move Option UTIL now allows you to do a MOVE rather than a COPY. A MOVE is similar to a COPY followed by a DELETE, except that the file is not actually copied. Rather, the destination directory merely gets the directory info from the source directory, and the entry is removed from the source directory. Thus, the operation is very fast (MUCH faster than a COPY)! MOVE can only be done on the same drive. Verify If you are a real stickler for security in your file transfers (e.g. COPY), you can *optionally* tell UTIL to "turn on" the VERIFY switch while doing the file transfer. You do this via the UT*OP environment vari- able. Check copies An additional protection mechanism during the COPY operation is the ability to tell to warn you if a copy is attemted which will write over a file which already exists. Like VE, this is done via the UT*OP environment vari- able. Disk full Copy will alert you if the destination disk is full. Documentation Documentation resides on your distribution diskette under the name UTIL.DOC. You can print it with: A>COPY UTIL.DOC PRN: