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1991-11-22
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135 lines
4COMMENT V1.0
11/16/91
(c)Copyright Saturn Software & John Bintz
4COMMENT extracts file descriptions from a bbs list or a formatted
capture file, matches them to existing files, and installs the
descriptions:
1. As comments into an achieved file (zip, arj, pak, zoo).
2. As a description in the 4dos file "descript.ion."
3. Or into a separate text file.
LIMIT OF LIABILITY
4COMMENT is distributed as is. The author makes no representation
with respect to the fitness of the software for any particular purpose
and disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied. The author will
assume no liability for damages either from the direct use of this
product or as a consequence of the use of this software.
SHAREWARE
4COMMENT is distributed as shareware. This means you can evaluate
the product before you decide to register it. If you are using it
after a couple of weeks, you should register it. You can copy 4COMMENT
or any shareware program and distributed to anyone else, provided that
neither the program nor the documentation is altered and that you do
not charge a fee. Because there is no advertising, distribution, or
packaging cost, the price of a shareware program is often less than an
equivalent package sold through retail channels.
The registration form is provided in a separate file.
SYNTAX:
4COMMENT Displays help file
4COMMENT DIRN FILEMASK [-c] [-4] [-t]
-c :Installs file description as zip/arj/pak/zoo comment
-4 :Installs short description in 4dos descript.ion
-t :Installs file description in text file named "dir" in
the current subdirectory. If such a file already exists,
it will be appended to without prior destruction.
Consequently, 4COMMENT can be run multiple times.
DIRN: Must be a qualified filename such as J:\DIRS\DIR4 or just
the filename if it resides in the current subdirectory. It
contains the descriptions of the files to be processed. The
file can be a PCB filelist or it can be a captured session
file. In this version of the program, the routine is not
very robust. A filename will not be handled correctly, if
it does not start at the first position of any line, or if
the filename stem and extension are separated by spaces.
FILEMASK
Can be a qualified filename or any set of ambiguous characters
that DOS permits, such as "j:\dl\myfile?.*". The '-t' and '-4'
options will work regardless of extensions; the '-c' option
will not because 4COMMENT uses the text of the extension to decide
what program to shell to. For example, the extension "zip" would
cause 4COMMENT to shell to pkzip if the '-c' option were in effect.
If the zipped file was named "myfile.zi1", no shelling would
take place and no comments would be installed.
Any compression program (PKZIP, ARJ, PAK, ZOO) used must be located
somewhere on the DOS path for the -c option to operate correctly.
4DOS
4COMMENT processes the "descript.ion" found in the subdirectory specified
in the filemask, or creates one if none exists.
4COMMENT is compatible with either the 40 character descriptions of V3
or the 4096 character descriptions of V4. It handles a maximum of
500 files per directory. However, if there were many files approaching
the 4096 character comment limit, memory would become a problem before
the file limit was reached.
In 4DOS, the text of the comment is limited to 40 characters. 4COMMENT takes
the comment to be the first 40 characters of the description which is
roughly the equivalents of the first line of a PCB description. However,
PCB allows 43 characters so there may be some truncation if the text
file is a PCB dir file or any other file that excedes the 4DOS limits.
If there is a "descript.ion" file, new entries are added corresponding
to the files processed. If an entry for a file already exists, it is
replaced by the new description.
4DOS V3 and V4 differ in their handling of entries to "descript.ion". In
version 3, the entire entry is text and it can be 40 characters long.
In version 4, extended descriptions are permitted and the entire
description can be up to 4096 characters long. Only 40 characters are
displayed and the remainder can be used by other programs for whatever
purpose. A control 'd', demarks the beginning of each area used by
another program.
4COMMENT takes this into account whenever there is a new description to a
file that already exists simply by appending the extended section to the
new description. There should be no problems, but it has not been tested
in a real situation since at this date 4dos version 4 has been available
for about a week and, to my knowledge, there are no programs which
take advantage of a control section.
Compressed files
Regardless of the original form of the description, 4COMMENT converts it
to a PCB type of description and installs the description in that
format as a comment. All compressed filetypes (zip, arj, pak, zoo) will
allow multiline comments.
The compressor version worked with are pkzip110, arj222, zoo210, and
pak210. While I looked at arc601 and lha113, either they didn't allow
for comments or I didn't discover how to make them work.
Text file
If the text file option is chosen, file entries will be formatted in
a PCB format and installed in a text file called "dir." That file will
be located in the subdirectory that 4COMMENT is initiated from, rather than
in the subdirectory being operated on.
The file is compatible with pcbfiler and should be compatible with any
other utility that you use to process dir files.
Errors
If an error is reported back from one of the compression programs, a
message is displayed on the screen to the effect that an error occurred
during the run. A file ("4COMMENT.ERR") is created which specifies the
file(s) in which there an error occurred.