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Club Amiga de Montreal - CAM
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Dautostart
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dautostart.doc.pp
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dautostart.doc
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1991-10-21
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DAUTOSTART.DOC
NOTE!! You must use 'lharc -r -x -a x dautostart' to properly
extract this archive.
The DAUTOSTART program and associated utilities is a system designed to
allow completely modular booting for your Amiga. Specifically, the
idea is for nothing in the SYS: directory hierarchy to depend on
various programs installed on your system. This includes getting
rid of absolute path specifications in your S:SHELL-STARTUP.
The basic idea is to bundle the installation scripts along with
the things being installed and have the scripts (that set up
assignments, path elements, and run programs in the background on
boot) automatically found by the DAUTOSTART program. Moving,
modifying, deleting, or adding PD & commercial software to your
system becomes trivial and also allows you to 'plug-and-play'
without having to modify your S:USER-STARTUP.
OVERVIEW OF OPERATION
Operation is simple. Your S:USER-STARTUP consists of a few simple
lines as shown in the USER-STARTUP file included with this
distribution. Basically the script does nothing more then run
DAUTOSTART.
DAUTOSTART will run through all mounted filesystems (the filesystems
that show up with INFO) looking for files named 'boot-sequence.1'.
If such a file exists in some directory DAUTOSTART will also scan
for additional files in that directory 'boot-sequence.2', etc...
up to 'boot-sequence.9'. All are incorporated into a master
script.
The boot-sequence.N files may be prioritized by specifying a
PRI=<priority> string on the FIRST LINE of any given boot-sequence.N
file. Refer to the example boot-sequence files in this distribution.
Priorities may range from -128 (lowest) to +127 (highest).
DAUTOSTART will take all the script files it finds, sort them by
priority, and output them to stdout. S:USER-STARTUP redirects stdout
to a ram file and then Execute's it. DAUTOSTART automatically inserts
CD commands so each script runs from its own directory, thereby
allowing completely relative path specifications for PATH and ASSIGN
commands. This capability allows you to move installed commercial
software around with a simply COPY ALL CLONE or RENAME without having
to modify the associated boot scripts.
These boot files will contain things such as assignments and PATH ADD
commands, as well as run various resident programs, etc, etc... After
execution of the master is complete, S:USER-STARTUP then calls a
DAUTOSTART utility called SAVEPATH which saves the current CLI path to
a public message port.
Your S:SHELL-STARTUP, an example of which is included in the
distribution, would then use the LOADPATH program to setup its path
instead of hardwired PATH ADD commands.
DIRECTORY SEARCHING
Since it is usually uneconomical to scan the entire directory tree for
each mounted filesystem, DAUTOSTART only scans ONE DIRECTORY DEEP for
each filesystem to start with. DAUTOSTART will also scan all
subdirectories associated with a directory containing a previously
scanned boot-sequence.N file, meaning that you can embed
boot-sequence.N files at lower levels of the directory tree if they
exist at higher levels.
Thus, DAUTOSTART normally does not take very long to find all
control scripts.
COMMAND ARGUMENTS
dautostart [directory, ...]
If no directories are specified, dautostart will scan all
mounted filesystems. If one or more directories are specified,
dautostart will scan ONLY The specified directories.
This allows dautostart to be used for purposes other then
booting.
savepath
saves the current CLI path to a special public message port. If
the public message port already exists then paths associated with
it are first deleted.
loadpath
loads the paths from the public message port into the CLI. Any
existing paths in the CLI are deleted.
EXAMPLE CODE
Example scripts exist in S/, EX1/, EX2/, and EX3/ ... to run the
example, place a blank formatted floppy in DF0: and run the MKEXAMPLE
script from this directory. Then reboot the machine with the floppy.
This will work under both 1.3 and 2.0
Note that the example, running from floppies with no optimizations,
will run slowly.