Put very simply, Black Hole deletes files from discs. When you run it, a little icon (a picture to you) will appear on the iconbar (the light grey bit at the bottom of your screen). If you drag a file from a directory onto this icon, the file will be deleted! Woopee!
{sprite}iconbar
It does a lot of other things too, but they'll only confuse you:
Like it has a file finder and a screen saver. And some other stuff.
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Black Hole was written to provide quick and easy ways of doing some of the more tedious jobs under RISC OS. It started life as a wastebin, but then whenever I found a job I wanted an application for, I added it to Black Hole.
{subhead}Black Hole provides the following:
* A quick and easy way of deleting files. All of the wipe options can be set from within Black Hole.
* It provides wipe features not normally available, such as the ability to retain directories.
* It can be configured to keep a backup copy of any file it deletes, for a specified length of time. This is for those of you who delete things by accident. I know I do, but then I've got a screw well and truly undone.
Wibble.
* All operations are multitasked as much as possible. This means you can get on with other things while BlackHole grinds away at your disc.
* It provides a facility for saving files from desktop applications into specified directories.
* It contains a file find utility. A very nice file find utilty, in fact. If quantity of code were any measure of relative importance, Black Hole would be a file-finder with an add-on wastebin. But it wasn't intended like that
Wibble.
* It puts a nice sprite on your iconbar which spins round or indulges in some other needless but rather fun activity.
* It contains a bit for disposing of the junk that lots of applications leave hanging around in your module area.
* It allows you to put TinyDirs icons on your icon bar without having to run !TinyDirs
* It contains a configurable screen saver, which uses up no extra memory when not running, and for which you can write your own savers in BASIC.
* Black Hole is fully compatible with Acorn's !Help. For those of you who don't want to read any more of this rubbish.
Black Hole has many features. Do not be put off if it appears complicated, it's actually very simple, and you don't need to understand most of it anyway. Most of the rest of this Help file is more coherent than it has been so far. All the explanations are perfectly clear. Any inability to understand them is purely the fault of the reader and the author accepts no criticisms of his grammar. She's a very nice old lady. Wibble.
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Actually, the most useful thing it does is to not delete files. Hopefully you are now confused. Good, I thought so. What I mean is that Black Hole doesn't actually delete files when you drag them onto Black Hole. What it does is to move them somewhere else where you can't see them. The place it moves them to is called the 'Bin Directory'. It will keep files in the bin directory for ever, but you can tell it to automatically delete them after a certain number of days.
[34]
As this help is for clever people, I'll explain something else. Black Hole, like other wastebins, doesn't actually delete files, it just moves them somwhere else. What sets Black Hole apart is that once it has moved the files there, it 'ages' them so that they are automatically deleted after a set number of days.
All wastebin programs need somewhere to store their rubbish. Some wastebin programs incorporate the rubbish as part of the code. This author prefers to let users supply their own rubbish. Such user-interactiveness is part of what makes life worth living. Or something. To store rubbish, Black Hole requires a directory which is imaginatively called the 'Bin Directory'. Normally this is the directory !BlakHole2.BlackHole, but may have been changed by the person who gave you the program. If this is the case, then Black Hole will probably report an error the first time it is run informing you that the Bin Directory cannot be found. What it then does is to revert to the default Bin Directory and save this to disc so that the error does not occur again. See below for more information about the Bin Directory. If you simply cannot get the program to run (a very, very unlikely probability) then check that the application contains all the files described at the end of this file, and try deleting the files 'Options' and 'SaveOpts'.
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Each time a file is copied into the Bin directory, it is placed in a sub- directory with the name "XXXX_YY_ZZ", where XXXX is the year, YY is the month, and ZZ is the day. This separates up your rubbish on a daily basis. You can open the Bin Directory by clicking the left mouse button over the Black Hole icon on the iconbar. If a subdirectory for today exists, that will
