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Text File | 1989-03-08 | 13.0 KB | 225 lines

MASDIR - The MASter DIRectory System Description of new features in Version 4.2 ***************************************************************** Use of the PgUp, PgDn, Home, and End keys. These keys can be very useful for paging backward and forward through large direc- tories. Pressing the PgUp key will redisplay the previous screen. This can also be used on the first screen to eliminate the header completely and display up to 144 filenames on one screen. B for Back will also work. PgDn pages to the next screen the same as C, End ends the display the same as Esc, and Home returns to the first screen--similar to pressing C at the end menu, but Home can also be used for this purpose at the interme- diate menu. To quickly get to the end of the listing, press the '-' key. The sorting will then be in reverse order as described next. Reverse sorting. The '-' character is the symbol to sort the file names in descending, vice ascending order. On the command line this can be /-, /a-, or /-a where a is one of the alphabetic chars N, X, S, or D. (There is no reverse for DOS order.) At ei- ther the end or the intermediate menu, pressing the "-" key will resort the names in reverse order using the same sort field. If the sort field is changed, reverse sorting will remain in effect if it has been selected. You could, for example, use SDL /D- /K /2 to show only the new files with the archive bit set, by date with the newest ones first. The /2 makes sure the date will be shown. Or you can sort by size with the largest files first. SDLSETUP permits you to specify whether default sorting is as- cending or in reverse order. The third major new feature is the print-to-file capability. Now on the Print Options menu a "File" option appears. If you select F you will be prompted for a file name. This can be any valid non-ambiguous file specification (no wildcards). If the file exists, the directory output will be appended to the end of the file. The intended use of this is to create catalog files of floppy disk directories, but you might think of another good use. Printing to a file automatically turns all printing OFF at the end of the directory listing. Now you can print a label or in- sert with your own descriptive titles, then immediately print ex- actly the same information to a disk file for cataloging purposes with just a couple of keystrokes. No need to exit to DOS. The /I option for printing a sleeve Insert has been restored as a command line option. Using /i or /I on the command line results in printing the Insert without bringing up the PRInt menu. The key letter for printing a Label from the Print Options menu is changed to L instead of W as being more mnemonic. Either P or R will bring up the print menu unless you change the pause key when you run SDLSETUP, then just R will work. If printing is ON or to a file, no intermediate menu will be displayed. The display will continue to scroll to the end menu. Of course, this only affects displays that have more than one screen of file names. A slight speedup in the display may be noticed due to placing DOS in binary mode. This disables such keys as Ctrl-Break, ^S, ^P, and ^PrtSc. This is done ONLY when pausing is in effect and printing is not ON, so it will not affect those who don't like the automatic pause. Ctrl-NumLock still works. It is more impor- tant now to not exit abnormally, such as with a Ctrl-Break, or DOS will be left in binary mode. This can easily be corrected by running SDL again. You can tell if DOS is in binary mode by TYPE- ing a file that has tabs in it. The tabs will not be expanded, and will appear as the ASCII 09 character. Also, the above con- trol keys will not work. ***************************************************************** Review of new features in Version 4.1 ■ Two features provide additional capability without exiting to DOS: Have you ever called up SDL to print a directory for a diskette only to notice that you had not set the proper volume label? Now you can set or change the volume label (as many times as you want) without returning to DOS. Just use /V on the command line, or press V when Vol is shown on the menu at the bottom of the screen. You could use this to serially number disks, for exam- ple. Control of printing is much more versatile. The prompt line in- dicates whether printing is on or off (Prn=ON or Prn=OFF). The P option brings up a print menu. On the print menu Esc will turn printing off if it was on or exit without turning it on. Press- ing C for Cls turns on page eject (ff for form feed). This is also indicated on the prompt line with (ff=ON or ff=OFF). Turn- ing printing off at the print menu with Esc will also turn off ff until you press C again. Thus you can now turn these features on or off, and you can change from one print mode to another without exiting to DOS. ■ This new feature speeds up the display: Disk Free Space is no longer shown unless specifically asked for with the /F option on the command line. For hard disks the amount of free space is not generally of interest unless the disk is quite full. DOS takes a noticeable amount of time to calcu- late the disk free space on large hard disks, so eliminating the display of this information greatly speeds up the directory dis- play. The setup program has an option to adjust this to your liking. The /F option on the command line, or selecting F from the menu will toggle it. ■ Additional features to make SDL more user-friendly: The bottom prompt lines are now on the last line of the screen in reverse color so they are more noticeable, and are as clear of the directory display as possible. SDL automatically adjusts for any number of lines of text your monitor is set for such as 43 line EGA, or 50 line VGA modes. This version of SDL has been tested with a listing of over 1000 files. The command line switch /P will now bring up the Print (Prn) menu. To make this possible the Pause (old /P) option has been changed to a /M (for More) option. If this is too incompatible with the older version for you, you can change P to be an addi- tional Pause switch, and use /R to bring up the print menu by running SDLSETUP. You may now select a new sort option at the intermediate prompt of multiscreen displays. This works like the 2, 4, 6 option by immediately producing a completely new display in the new sort order. Thus you do not have to wait till all screens of a large directory have been displayed to change the sort order. ■ New configuration features in SDLSETUP: A setup option to use the box drawing characters on the printer like those on the screen if you have a printer that supports these characters. Currently dashes and vertical bars are used on the printer to maximize the compatibility. In SDLSETUP you can now specify if you would prefer the real box drawing characters. Another new SDLSETUP feature is the ability to suppress the . and .. file directory entries. They are not really needed for anything and can be confusing. You may now select additional default sort orders. The orders of N for Name (the default), X for eXtension, D for Date, and O for Original or dOs (nO sort at all), are available. SDLSETUP now has a (cr) option to select "no change" for any question and just move on to the next. Pressing Esc will skip to the next section. This speeds up the trip through this con- figuration program. Other improvements have also been made to SDLSETUP to make it even easier to use. The height of the tiny font varies with different printers. Some can get more rows of file names on the label. You can ad- just the number of rows that you want on labels when you use the Tiny option. ■ SDL differences at the intermediate pause: If there are too many file names for one screen, a couple of changes will be noticed. SDL will automatically adjust the num- ber of columns to maximize the amount of information displayed on the minimum number of screens. Cls is no longer automatic be- tween screens of a multiscreen display. Unless C is pressed to continue, the display will scroll giving the appearance of a con- tinuous list of file names unbroken by prompt lines. Thus if there are only a few more rows of files, you will still be able to see the balance of the names on the previous display. You may now select a new sort option at the intermediate prompt of multiscreen displays. This works like the 2, 4, 6 option by immediately producing a completely new display in the new sort order. Thus you do not have to wait till all screens have been displayed to change the sort order. ■ Miscellaneous additional new features: If you use /P on the command line to bring up the print menu, then the W and T options will still calculate the number of columns to produce a label. To preserve some amount of com- patibility, any of /R, /I, or /T will bring up the print menu in addition to /P. This additional compatibility feature may be changed or missing in future releases. The /W command line option now just puts the display into 6 columns. This is to prevent a problem if the user is thinking of the "wide" display of DIR. This feature may change or be eliminated in future versions. The attribute for the highlighted key letters in the bottom prompt line is selected automatically. This may not produce ac- ceptable results on monochrome graphics displays. You can use SDLSETUP to select the monochrome attribute if you like that bet- ter. The key characters on the reminder line are highlighted. The highlighting will go away if you restore the titles by using SDLSETUP and either input your own titles or let SDLSETUP replace the default titles by just pressing RETURN for each title. When highlighting is in effect, that one line will not respond to DOS redirection (>), but if you put in your own titles using SDLSETUP, the redirection capability of that line is restored. Return, Space, and Escape are the only accepted exit keys. An illegal key will cause a beep to be heard. Return and Space will clear the screen if Cls is ON, Esc will not. (A few other odd keys will also work, but they should cause no problems.) The calculation of the total "Bytes in xxx Files" is rounded up to the next exact kilobyte for each file. (Individual file sizes are not.) The old total was not very useful in that it did not indicate the amount of disk space actually used by the files. Rounding the size to K-bytes makes it agree with the amount of space used on a floppy disk. If you do a CHKDSK on a floppy, the amount of space used for the same set of files will now agree with the SDL total. A common use for this total is to determine whether certain files will fit on a floppy. The new calculation makes it possible to make this determination accurately. The same set of files will actually take up more space on a hard disk, and possibly less space on a RAM disk depending on the cluster size. I would appreciate hearing from you if you have any comments or suggestions about the operation of SDL and SDLSETUP. Remember to press ESC to exit ...