Welcome to The Medieval Period. This little program lists and counts files based on the extensions to their names. An extension to a name is a bit of text after a period, as in "readme.txt", where the ".txt" part is the extension. You might be wondering why this program is called "The Medieval Period". There are two reasons. First, the program counts files with a period in the middle, and The Medieval Period sounded better than The Middle Period. Second, the word "medieval" means pertaining to the middle ages, and using this sort of period-extension to control things is a mechanism which archaic systems, such as DOS and Windows 3, relied a great deal on the extensions to the names to make sense of files. Macintosh, a far more modern system in practice if not date, relies very little on period-extensions, and they are mostly used when there is the possibility of contact with the non-Macintosh world, such as the internet.
I wrote this little application to help keep track of a cross-platform project with many thousands of files. The program let me get lists of files of various types (extensions), which helped me make sure that I had the files I wanted to have. I am not sure of what other use it is, but if I found it useful, someone else might as well.
One can set several options with the Set-Options command. One can choose to make the search case-sensitive or not, and one can have the file names reported just as names, or as path names which means that the folders and subfolders that the file is in are also included. When one types in the extension on which to base the search, that extension must have a period in it somewhere. (More than one is allowed.) If there is no period, one is supplied at the beginning. (If you enter txt, the program will search for .txt.) If the text entered is more than ten characters long, only the last ten characters will be used. Note that one is not limited to DOS-type of extensions, which can only be three characters long; one can also search for Unix-type extensions such as .sit.hqx or .suit.
If one wants a list of all files, leave the edit field in the Options window blank. One can also get some additional information--the size of the file, the creation date, and the modification date. These are put in with a tab separation, so you can put them into a database easily. (If you have a really long pathname, you may have some problems with these. The total length of a string cannot exceed 256 characters, and the program does not checkto see if your path name plus the size, etc is under 256.)
That is about it. It is a simple program written to solve a simple need. If you do not have a similar need, it will not be of much use.
Legal and Money Stuff:
This program is copyrighted 1996 by Robert Schenk. Report any bugs in the program, suggestions for improvements, or other comments to him at:
bobs@kagi.com
No warranty is given that this program will do anything useful for you or that it will even work as it is intended to work. All the standard software disclaimers apply to this program, stuff like if this program destroys your computer, do not blame me.
This program is shareware ($5). See the Register program which should be with this program for instructions on how to pay. $5 is not much, but I am not sure that the program will be of great value to a lot of people. If it is of value to you, vote for future improvements by paying the shareware fee. I have many shareware programs, not to mention commercial typefaces, and cannot afford to upgrade those which no one pays for (unless of course I find the upgrade personally useful).
I hope you enjoy this program and have fun with it.
