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1993-03-03
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BWSave
A simple Blue Wave packet merger.
Version 1.2 February, 1993
(c) Copyright David A. Gersic 1993. All rights reserved
Quick Start: For people who hate reading entire
documentation files just to find out what a program does,
this compressed file contains a program that will merge
Blue Wave mail packets so that you can keep important
messages in a format where they are easily used and found.
It is command line driven and has no options other than the
name of the mail packets to work with.
Installation: Installation of BWsave is simple, just
decompress the executable file (BWSAVE.EXE) into a
subdirectory that is on your DOS path.
Operation: BWSave takes two command line arguments,
the name of the packet to scan for saved messages, and the name
of the packet to copy them to. Messages that are marked for 'Save'
in the mail packet will be copied to the save packet. For example,
the mail I download from my own bbs has a name like CONNECTN.SA1
(see the Blue Wave documentation for an explanation of valid Blue
Wave mail packet names), and I use CONNECTN.999 as my permanent
message archive. The command line 'BWSAVE CONNECTN.SA1
CONNECTN.999' will uncompress CONNECTN.SA1 and CONNECTN.999 to
temporary directories, add messages marked for saving in
CONNECTN.SA1 to the packet in CONNECTN.999 and recompress
CONNECTN.999. Warning: you should specify a valid Blue Wave
packet file name for the save packet name. BWSave doesn't care
what you name it, but Blue Wave will only "see" correct file names.
Speed: From my own testing, most of BWSave's processing
time is spent shelling to the archiving programs. A good disk
cache does speed up BWSave's operation, though, as it is
disk intensive. I use, and recommend, HyperDisk, but others
like SmartDrive, NCache, or PC-Kwik should work.
Bugs: As far as I know, there are no actuall bugs in
BWSave, but there are a few potential bits of wierdness. First,
BWSave makes no attempt to keep you from saving the same message
twice. Second, the sorting algorthm I used is not 'stable'
(meaning that duplicate records are not garaunteed to come out
in the same order that they started), so messages _within_ an
area may be out of (posting) order. If I get around to writing
a new sort function that is stable, this anomally will go away.
Third, I detect the type of archiver used to compress the mail
packet, but only Zip, LHA, ARJ, and Pak format archives can be
handled. Any other archiver will give you an error message. If
somebody wants to NetMail me the command lines that should be
used for Zoo, ARC, and ARC6 formats, I'll be happy to add them.
Archiver detection may not be perfect, either, as I only use
and tested Zip, LHA, and ARJ. Fourth, BWSave assumes that it can
find your archive utilities on your DOS PATH, and that they are
named PKZIP/PKUNZIP, LHA, or ARJ. If you have renamed them, BWSave
will not be able to find them and may work in strange and
wonderous ways.
Legal Caveats: While I have tried my hardest to develop
and test this software to ensure that there are no bugs in
it, I make no claim that it is perfect. If any bugs are
found, I would appreciate a report of them, but I take no
responsibility for any damage they may do.
This software is copyrighted material. It may be
distributed freely, but only in complete and unmodified
form. If you are going to use it regularly, you must
register it. As this is a simple utility that I wrote because
I wanted one, I'm only asking for $5. If it isn't worth $5
to you, delete it from your disk. Remember, shareware only
works if you pay.
Thanks go to:
George Hatchew, author of the Blue Wave mail system.
The packet structures used in BWSave were obtained
from him to ensure (I hope) compatibility.
Fabrice Bellard, author of Lzexe.
Bob Stout, keeper of the C_Echo SNIPPETs.
Heinz Ozwirk, for a modified version of his archiver
detection code.
Walter Bright, for the file_copy() function.
Michael Tatum and George Worley for pointing out a few
bugs that I missed in version 1.0.
George Worley for pointing out a bug in 1.1, also.
New in version 1.1:
Deleting all of the messages in a message area was
confusing BWSave which would then run out of
memory trying to add a new message to the saved
packet; fixed.
Only about 120 messages could be saved; fixed. I tested
saving up to over 1600 messages and had no problems
with BWSave or Blue Wave handling the packet.
New in version 1.2:
BWSave was producing a <BBS Name>.MIX file that the Blue
Wave reader couldn't work with. It appeared that BWSave
was not saving some messages marked for saving, but in
fact the messages were in the save packet; you just
couldn't see them with the Blue Wave reader. As far as
I can tell, using the 1.2 version of BWSave will
'correct' the broken save packet and all saved messages
will show up automagically.
For Those Who Are Interested: This software was written in
the C language, using Microsoft's C compiler ver. 6.00, and
compressed with Fabrice Bellard's Lzexe file compressor.
Contacting the Author:
U.S. Mail: David Gersic
927 E. Garden St.
DeKalb, Il 60115
(815) 753-8548
BITNET: A02DAG1@NIU.BITNET
Internet: a02dag1@noc.niu.edu
FidoNet: 1:11/70.
BWSave (c) Copyright David A. Gersic 1993. All rights reserved