A small list of organizations have my authorization to distribute TrashMan:
For authorization, please contact me at the address below.
NOTE:
TrashMan is NOT free. TrashMan is shareware. TrashMan will make your System 7 trashcan behave the way it ought to, and might save you hours of lost work. Isn’t that worth a few dollars?
If you use it, please send $10.00 to:
Dan Walkowski
140 Pasito Terrace #512
Sunnyvale, CA 94086
email: walkowsk@taurus.apple.com
(For site license information, please contact me.)
In addition, if you have some sort of Net access, (GEnie, InterNet, BitNet, CompuServe, AOL, etc.), please send along your address, so that I can get in touch with you if necessary.
Paying your registration fee will entitle you to use all possible future versions of TrashMan freely. (Not to mention that your feature requests will receive higher priority).
Additionally, if you include a floppy disk with your payment, you will either get the latest version (if you do not have it) or the next release, if you wish.
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FIRST:
I would like to extend my thanks to my beta-testers:
Akif Eyler, Amit Parghi, Bill Walker, David Hull, Keith Cummings, Jerry Wilcox, Pat McClaughry, Murph Sewall, Adam Engst, Alberto Ricci, Brian Gordon, A.K.Burton, John Brewer, and Steve Goldberg.
(I hope I'm not forgetting anyone...)
TrashMan is straightforward and easy to use because I made it that way. Although it looks simple, it is 2491 lines of code at last count. Please give me an incentive to keep writing useful software by registering your copy of TrashMan. Is $10 that much to ask?
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NEWS
Version 4.0.5
• Good news! I have discovered a way to determine whether the disk in a Powerbook is spinning, so now TrashMan can finally be labelled 'PowerBook Friendly'. TrashMan will not spin up the disk to delete a file, it will wait until the disk is spun up at some later time and then do its work.
However, this feature will only be available to you if one (or both) of the following is true:
a) You have a relatively 'new' PowerBook (I know the Duos support it, I am told the 145B doesn't, and I think all the higher numbered PB's since the 160 do.)
b) You have PowerBook File Assistant installed.
• TrashMan now _really_ works if you have AppleScript installed. (I actually fixed this bug in the Engine in 4.0.4, but overlooked fixing it in the Emptier)
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WHAT IS TRASHMAN?
• TrashMan is a system enhancement designed for System 7 and beyond. (TrashMan will not work with System Software prior to 7.0)
•TrashMan works like an electronic compost heap, deleting files from your trash after they have 'aged' beyond a setpoint that you specify, in days, hours, and minutes. (For example, I keep mine set at 1 day, so I always have exactly the last 24 hours worth of trash in my trashcan.) TrashMan works with all local mounted volumes except floppies. *(see below)
• If you use TrashMan, you need never choose ‘Empty Trash’ from the ‘Special’ menu ever again, and yet still receive the benefits of the new non-emptying trash in System 7.0.
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HOW DO I SET UP TRASHMAN?
• Place the TrashMan Emptier on your desktop. It is easiest if it is near your disk icons.
• Drop the TrashMan Controls and the TrashMan Engine onto your System Folder. They will be routed to the correct place. (The Controls are a Control Panel, and the Engine is an Extension).
• Open your Control Panels Folder. Open the TrashMan Controls icon and set your preferences.
• You are done. The next time you restart, the Engine will launch and you are in business.
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OK, DAN, I’VE SET IT UP LIKE YOU DESCRIBED. NOW WHAT DO I DO WITH IT?
Go back to the TrashMan Control Panel. Here’s what each of the controls do in more detail:
•The top set of controls allow you to adjust the length of time files will be allowed to stay in the trash before being deleted. Clicking the up or down arrows increases or decreases the units of time. Checking the 'Delete locked items too' checkbox gives TrashMan permission to delete items from the trash that are locked. (An item can be locked by selecting it, and choosing 'Get Info...' in the Finder, then checking the 'locked' checkbox.)
•The bottom control allows you to change the ejecting behavior of the Emptier. If the checkbox is checked, volumes that are dropped on the Emptier will be unmounted and ejected after their trash is emptied. This works with all volumes, except those that are shared. Note that the use of the option key when dropping a volume temporarily reverses the sense of this setting.
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OK, I UNDERSTAND THAT THE ENGINE TIME-STAMPS AND DELETES OLD FILES. BUT WHAT DOES THIS GOOFY ‘EMPTIER’ THING DO?
The Emptier can be thought of as a selective Empty Trash command. Any disks that you drop onto it will have their trash emptied completely. All other disks will be left alone. This is especially handy for dealing with floppies, since it is often the case that you want to erase all the trash from a floppy before ejecting it. Using the Emptier, this is a one-step operation, since you can have the Emptier eject it afterwards.
Note that holding down the option key while dropping the disk will temporarily reverse this setting.
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WELL, IT SOUNDS NICE, BUT I DON’T WANT ANOTHER EXTENSION IN MY SYSTEM FOLDER.
Although the TrashMan Engine _appears_ to be an extension (an INIT) it is not, in the normal sense. It is a faceless background application, with a special type, so that the Finder treats it as an Extension. TrashMan does NOT patch any traps, or have any INIT code in it. It is simply a program like any other, and therefore has no chance of conflicting with other extensions.
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WHY DID YOU WRITE TRASHMAN?
The trash can on the desktop is a wonderful idea, except that I found myself doing something that I’m sure many of you do also: I would drop something in the Trash, and then immediately go to the Special menu and choose ‘Empty Trash’. Why? Because I, like many of you, run at near capacity on my hard disks, and always want to have as much free space as possible.
The new trash can in System 7.0 is a much improved version of its ancestors, but introduces new problems. It is wonderful that the Trash no longer empties unexpectedly, but now if you don’t choose ‘Empty Trash’ periodically, it will accumulate many files, wasting valuable disk space. So what happens? I choose ‘Empty Trash’ more often! Although this isn’t bad, it negates the reason that the new non-emptying Trash was developed: so that when you throw something in accidentally, you can retrieve it later!
It seems that what is needed is a program that automatically empties the Trash. However, if it just empties everything every time you run it, it will be no more useful than the ‘Empty Trash’ command. What is really needed is a ‘Smart’ trash. One that doesn’t throw away everything in the trash, just the files that have been there a ‘long’ time. (And I want to be able to decide what ‘long’ means.) After over 23 years of painstaking research, I have developed TrashMan. (Well, OK, it wasn’t quite that long).
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MORE QUESTIONS ABOUT TRASHMAN
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WILL TRASHMAN SLOW DOWN MY COMPUTER?
TrashMan uses only a little RAM, and is configured to be an extremely, EXTREMELY low-priority process, because my intention is for TrashMan to have as little effect on the performance of your Mac as possible.
ARE THERE ANY CONFLICTS WITH ANY OTHER WIDGETS?
None that I know of, and since the Engine is NOT an INIT, the possibility is very small.
WILL TRASHMAN FIND THE TRASH IF I HAVE RENAMED IT TO SOMETHING ELSE?
(You mean like 'Slime Pit'?)
YES.
COULD TRASHMAN SOMEHOW DELETE FILES THAT ARE NOT IN THE TRASH?
ABSOLUTELY NOT.
MIGHT TRASHMAN DELETE SOMEONE ELSE'S FILES FROM A FILESERVER?
NO, TrashMan doesn’t time-stamp or automatically delete trashed files from a server, since they are all deleted when you disconnect from the server anyway.
WHEN MIGHT TRASHMAN NOT WORK?
TrashMan will not work with versions of the System earlier than 7.0.
TrashMan never touches files on servers, to keep down net traffic,
and because server trash is emptied when you disconnect.
TrashMan doesn’t touch files on floppies either, since they do not have a Desktop Database. (This is so that they are compatible with Macs running system 6. In the future, if Apple develops new larger floppy drives, TrashMan will work correctly with them)
WOULD TRASHMAN WORK WELL ON A SERVER?
YES YES!! TrashMan would be ideal to use on a fileserver, because it would limit how long users could let files accumulate in their trash, wasting space on the server.
HOW DOES TRASHMAN WORK?
The TrashMan Engine incrementally scans the files in the trash continuously. When it finds a file it has never seen before, it 'time stamps' it by writing a code in the 'Get Info' comment field. When it finds a file that has been there longer than the maximum age allowed, it deletes it.
This means that you will lose any comments that you have attached to files when you throw them in the trash. This is probably insignificant, since we are all used to losing the darn things every time we rebuild the desktop anyway.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks again to my beta-testers, especially John Brewer, who assisted me on some late-night bug-stomping expeditions.
DISCLAIMER
(Sorry about this, but I have to C.M.A.)
Although TrashMan has been tested heavily and no problems have been found, I do not have the resources to test it under every conceivable condition.
This means that you use TrashMan ‘as-is’, and at your own risk. I TAKE NO RESPONSIBILITY FOR ANY LOSS OF DATA THAT MIGHT OCCUR, and by using this software, you agree to these conditions.
Public Service Announcement:
TrashMan doesn't throw away your files. It recycles them.
DAW 93
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VERSION HISTORY
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Version 4.0.4
• Removed the Speed controls in the Control Panel. As long as the speed was set below a certain value, there was very little change in performance, so it is now set low enough permanently. This reduces the complexity for first-time users too.
• TrashMan now works if you have AppleScript installed. (I was handling a Gestalt call incorrectly, so when AppleScript was installed, TM thought AppleEvents weren't)
• A very rare launch bug should now be gone. (A very few people couldn't restart the Engine from the control panel after it had been stopped.)
• PowerBook performance has been tweaked again. Now the Engine will not wake up and check the trash unless the mouse has been moved recently. Until I can find a way of determining whether the disk is spinning, this will have to do.
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Version 4.0.3
• In previous versions, if there were things in the trash, TrashMan could prevent PowerBooks from going to sleep. This has finally been eliminated. I also changed the speeds in the control panel. They have all been shifted 'slower'.
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Version 4.0.2
• Fixed an even more obscure bug, involving files on servers and concurrency, by having the Engine ignore trash that you drop on a server. It is emptied when you disconnect anyway, and this reduces network traffic.
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Version 4.0.1
• Fixed obscure bug. A long integer was being clipped to a short by mistake. Unfortunately, this was an IMPORTANT long integer. (Maybe I should throw in a few unneeded variables in my programs, so that the chance of an important one being affected is smaller. hahahaha)
• Added some more error checking (you can never have enough of that...) and changed the text in some error dialogs to be more descriptive.
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Version 4.0.0
• Completely rewritten from scratch. New incremental scanning algorithm, which is undetectable in normal operation. No more pauses as TM scans your trash!
• Split into 3 parts, so as to minimize memory usage.
• Pretentious 3D animated 'About Box' and gratuitous sounds added to control panel.
• Controls are simpler. TrashMan is even _easier_ to use.
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(Previous version info deleted to save space. It is irrelevant now anyway, since the program works completely differently)
