FileDude 5.3 What's New ================================================================ FileDude 5.3 released ---------------------- See the WHATS.NEW file. FileDude 5.2 released ---------------------- WHAT TO DO Delete your FILEDIZ.DAT and VIRSCAN.DAT files and any files ending with the .SWP extension in your FileDude directory. Make sure to use the new FORMATS.DAT contained in this package. THE GOOD STUFF Add Added time slicing for Desqview, Windows 3.x, OS/2 2.0, OS/2 2.1, and OS/2 3.0 to the DOS version of FileDude. Add A few undocumented MCI codes from FileDude 5.1: %FC 6 BODYINFO.ASC Number of credits required for file %FD 8 BODYINFO.ASC Date of file entry BODY.ASC EXTBODYx.ASC %F9 6 BODYINFO.ASC Number of downloads of a file The BODYINFO.ASC comes right after any BODY.ASC or EXTBODYx.ASC lines. In FileDude 5.1, the %FD was only valid in the BODYINFO.ASC. Change FileDude no longer lets you "Pack the EXTENDED.DAT" if you have not tagged ALL file areas for processing. Add "Fix Date" will now fix entry dates which are more recent than "today's" date. i.e. 01/01/99 will be fixed if you run FileDude on 01/01/95. Fix Date stamping on file entries now works properly. Before, new files might show up for up to 5 days after they were uploaded by FileDude. Yikes! Fix FileDude now resets the color of the DOS prompt to LIGHTGRAY upon exiting -- even if you run with /NOMENU. Fix CD-ROM Format associations went haywire if you pressed PgUp or PgDn. Fixed now. Fix FileDude would croak on blank first-line descriptions when doing CD-ROM/FILES.BBS imports. Fix FileDude would create empty TEMPLATE directories if you ran it from somewhere other than its home directory. It also would not correctly move the template files if you ran it off a different drive. Fixed. Submitted by Carl Morris. Fix The first entry starting on the first line of a FILES.BBS is now imported. Submitted by Carl Morris. Change FILEDUDE.LOG streamlined; got rid of unnecessary "Processing [AREA]" statements. Idea submitted by Carl Morris. Fix If FileDude packed one of its .DAT files while on a different drive than its home directory, an error would occur. Fixed. Fix FileDude no longer packs its AREACFG.DAT an infinite number of times whenever you add or delete a file area near the beginning of the list. Change Rewrote error-handling routines, so you get a more useful message, and the error messages to FILEDUDE.LOG are more uniform. Fix The descriptions associated with padded filenames in a FILES.BBS were not imported correctly, resulting in a strange "P " in front of the description. Fixed. Submitted by Carl Morris. Add Added "FileDude will be running inside a window" option to the Advanced Config menu. This option, when toggled on, will force FileDude to always update the ACTUAL position of the cursor. This positioning of the cursor allows for easier viewing inside a DV, OS/2, or Windows window (less than full-screen.) Submitted by Carl Morris. Add The FILEDUDE.LOG file will now be erased and started over every time it reaches 64k. Add FileDude has new grammar skills. In all template files, you can now have FileDude choose between a singular or plural form of a word. For example: %F3 %[directory/directories] This example will choose either "directory" or "directories", depending on the value of the %F3 code. 0 is considered plural. Inspired by Amit Patel. Add FileDude's new grammar skills extended to the "Stats" display at the end of processing. Fix Fixed the error when FileDude tried to upload a filelist to a .DIR that was not accessible due to SHARE. FileDude will now simply tell the user that it cannot upload the filelist. Fix FileDude no longer deletes the actual file when it encounters a duplicate entry in the same area as the original entry. The format of FILEDIZ.DAT and VIRSCAN.DAT and the .SWP files was changed to make this possible. Submitted by Daniel Osborn. Add "Set Hatch Flag" option added to the Misc menu. This option instructs FileDude to set the hatch flag on for file entries which are uploaded or updated by FILES.BBS. Submitted by Carl Morris. Add "Auto Virus Validate" option added to the Misc menu. This option, to be used in conjunction with "Set Hatch Flag", instructs FileDude to automatically consider all entries with the hatch flag ON to be free of viruses. You only need to process the files with this option once for it to take effect. Running it more than once will not harm it, though. This option is intended to avoid redudant virus checks when running a .TIC -> FILES.BBS manager which does virus checking. Submitted by Carl Morris. Change Because the Misc menu was getting so big, all filelist-related options have been moved to a brand new menu called [gasp] the Filelist menu. The Misc menu has also be reorganized. Add "Process New Areas" option added to the Misc menu. This option instructs FileDude to automatically place checks next to new areas in the Area Config menu. In other words, this option tells FileDude to scan for new areas and add them to the processing list on the next run. This option only affects the current config; the new areas will not be automatically processed by other configurations unless their "Process New Areas" flags are toggled on. Submitted by Michael Glenn. Add "Only List New Files" option added to the Filelist menu. This option instructs FileDude to only include newly uploaded files on the generated filelist. The number of days limit for what is considered "new" is defined in the Basic Config menu. Fix FileDude would sometimes have an error if a FILEDIZ.DAT was greater than 16,384 bytes and was not a multiple of 16,384. The problem was not as stupid as it sounds -- it was very interesting, in fact -- but the details are "beyond the scope of this document." Submitted by Nick Amento. Add "Information" static window added to menu screen. Inspired by Carl Morris (and his illogical need to know which config he's working on...) Fix FileDude now correctly virus scans non-archives and files of unknown archive types. It wasn't copying the files into the directory it virus scans. Add "No Decompression" option added to Misc menu. This option instructs FileDude to not decompress archives before running the virus scanner defined in Basic Configuration. This allows you to use upload processors, such as THD, as your virus scanner. Fix If "Check Version" was checked and you ran FileDude with the /NOMENU option, it would bomb out with an array overrun error. FileDude was having problems writing a DEL.BBS for files with no extended descriptions. New An OS/2 version of FileDude -- FileDude/2 -- has been created. Fix Fixed all the QEMM-type memory exceptions and other problems resulting from memory corruption. Add "Compression Wildcard" and "Decompression Wildcard" fields added to the "Archive Config" menu. This allows FileDude to use archivers which do not use "*.*" as their wildcard specification. Most notably, this now allows FileDude/2 for OS/2 to use Info-ZIP for OS/2. Fix FileDude no longer uploads the WORKING.ASC file if "Upload Everything in Sight" is toggled on. FileDude 5.1 released ---------------------- WHAT TO DO 1) Delete your old FILEDUDE.DAT. This version uses a much improved file format. 2) Make SURE you are using the new FORMATS.DAT included in this package. GOOD STUFF Mod: Registration is now only US $10. That's a low price for all the benefits you get when you register. Fix: FileDude can how handle 1024 file areas, the maximum Renegade allows. New: Multiple template sets. You can now define a template directory in the Basic Configuration menu. Each config can have its own template directory. Change: FILE_ID.DIZ is now always used before DESC.SDI. Many people requested this. A LOT of people. Fix: If a compressed filelist (such as FILELIST.ZIP) already exists, FileDude will now delete it before creating a new one. Before, programs such as PKZIP would just add the file into an existing archive, and if you changed the filelist filename, you'd end up with two different files in the archive when you only wanted one. Submitted by Carl Morris. Fix: FileDude now correctly wraps descriptions with pipe color codes. Before, it was not measuring the lines correctly. Submitted by Carl Morris. Fix: FileDude was not closing the FILES.BBS before deleting it. It now closes it properly. New: "Mark Filelist As New" toggle in the Misc menu. If toggled on, the upload date on the filelist entry will be updated so your users will see it on their newscan. Regardless of this toggle, users will still find the filelist on their newscan the first time FileDude uploads it. Submitted by Carl Morris. New: %TI = Current time. This MCI code is useful if you want users to know when your filelist is created, for example. Submitted by Carl Morris. Fix: FileDude leaves a few more bytes of itself in memory when shelling to DOS. This fixes a problem under Desqview, where COMMAND.COM might have trouble reloading. Submitted by Carl Morris. Fix: Color was not reset upon exit. This resulted in a "nice shade of magenta." FileDude now properly restores your colors. Submitted by: Nicholas Loch Fix: When extracting FILE_ID.DIZ from archives, FileDude will now delete the previous one in the temporary directory no matter what file attributes it has. Before, a FILE_ID.DIZ with a read-only attribute, for example, would prevent FileDude from deleting it, thus causing files with no FILE_ID.DIZ to inherit the description. Yikes! New: "Validated Filelist" toggle in the Misc menu. This toggle will prevent unvalidated and resume files from showing up on your filelist. Submitted by Carl Morris. New: FileDude finds FILE_ID.DIZ and DESC.SDI files inside ZIP and ARJ archives faster. It now internally recognizes their header formats. Fix: A very bad bug in the configuration file's packing routine was corrected. This would lead to loss of data and messages like "Data file tampered with!" But it's fixed now, and the packing is actually faster. New: When scanning for FILE_ID.DIZ and DESC.SDI files, FileDude now keeps a record (in FILEDIZ.DAT) of which files it has scanned. This "memory" is based on the CRC-32 of several file statistics, so if anything about that file changes, FileDude will rescan it. If you want to rescan ALL files for DIZ or SDI descriptions, simply delete the FILEDIZ.DAT file. Fix: FileDude should now properly handle areas which you have just set up and RG has not yet created a .DIR file for. Fix: When processing areas, you can now abort between areas which do not contain any files. New: FileDude now contains a default "Virus scanner commandline" (in the Basic Configuration menu) for McAfee SCAN v.2.1.1 and up. This version is one of the first of a new line of scanners from McAfee. It's much better than the old line. You can find this scanner on a board near you as the filename SCN-2xxx.ZIP, where 'xxx' is an interesting hexadecimal version number of some sort. Fix: The "Delete Offline" toggle no longer requires the "Fix Offline" toggle to be turned on. What a dumb dependency. Fix: Nows finds files in the upload directory. Before, FileDude marked any files in the upload directory as offline, since the program only checked the download directory. The FILES.BBS-type list, however, must still be in the download directory. New: "Fix Upload Date" toggle in the Fix menu. FileDude will set the .DIR date to "today's date" when it finds a file is newer than the .DIR entry's date. If you get a file through a network file echo, for example, this means that any new versions of a file will show up on a newscan when FileDude updates the .DIR. Mod: Filelists are now uploaded as VALIDATED, regardless of the "Don't Validate" toggle. New: Formatting of MCI codes in the filelist templates has been completely revamped. See the new FDMCI.DOC for details. Thanks to Carl Morris for suggesting the new method. (Though, it's not exactly what he wanted...) Mod: FileDude now imports descriptions from ZIP and ARJ archives whose extensions aren't ".Zxx" or ".Axx". Mod: Parsing during DIZ and SDI importing is noticeably faster. Fix: Fixed the FILES.BBS-import wordwrap problems. Fix: No longer cuts off the last line of a wrapped description. New: "Wordwrap FILE_ID.DIZ" in the Description menu. By default, FileDude no longer wraps DIZ descriptions. It will still wrap DESC.SDI and FILES.BBS descriptions. Mod: The default description is no longer configurable for UNREGISTERED users of FileDude. Once you register, the "UNREGISTERED" part will go away and you can change the default description to whatever you want. New: "Default Uploader" in the Advanced Menu. You can specify a different uploader from the default, which is the sysop. *** REGISTERED-only feature *** Mod: Updates of DEL.LST and DEL.BBS should be much faster now. New: "Delete Dups From Disk" in the Fix Menu. Forces duplicates to be deleted from diskette, regardless of the "Don't Delete Actual Files" toggle. New: DEL.BBS now includes the extended description of files. New: "Update SYSOP.LOG" in the Misc Menu. Logs session statistics to SYSOP.LOG in RG's LOG directory. Fix: No longer does DIZ and FILES.BBS checking, virus scanning, or archive conversion on files with the RESUME flag. Fix: The user-defined line lengths will now be used when wrapping FILE_ID.ASC, *IF* those line lengths are less than or equal to 45 characters. Why? The FILE_ID.DIZ standard is 45 characters by 10 lines. FileDude is not about to produce non-standard FILE_ID.DIZ descriptions. Fix: Wordwrapping improved. Mod: Swapping routines are now used when shelling to DOS for archive functions. Mod: When a processing event which is building a filelist is aborted, the incomplete WORKING.ASC is now deleted. Fix: FileDude now realizes the FILE_ID.DIZ standard is 45 characters, not 40. Thanks to Carl Morris for pointing this out to me. Mod: FILEDUDE.LOG is now opened in DENYWR mode (so you can read the log in another window while FileDude is processing.) Fix: FileDude will now prompt you to save your configuration if you change a toggle such as "Fix Offline". Finally! Mod: FileDude now requires a 286 or higher. Mod: FILEDUDE.LOG is now more readable, and processing should be faster with the log option toggled on. Mod: Every time a new filelist was produced, a new entry was made in FILEDIZ.DAT, and the old entry was still there. Mod: FileDude now scans all files it uploads for viruses, when the virus scanning option is toggled, regardless of whether it has been scanned before. REMOVED: Duplicate extended description checking. (What the heck was the point?) FileDude v5.0 released ---------------------- FileDude was almost completely rewritten for this release. The result was a much faster, extremely reliable product. Speed If you saw version 4.0, you will be simply amazed at how fast this version runs. Even on the slowest features, version 5.0 can outrun 4.0. Size Version 4.0 was around 357k. Version 5.0 is around 253k. Yeah!! Rem I _strongly_ suggest you register this version. The registered copy of FileDude v5.0 has many new, NICE features. See BENEFITS.REG and REGISTER.FRM for more details. Fixed Archive conversion. It's ten times better than before. Fixed CD-ROM import array errors. FileDude can now import a CD-ROM list up to 64k (for one file area.) Fixed One whopping memory leak. FileDude can now handle a file base of any size, so you never have to worry about it overloading. Fixed Word-wrapping and general handling of descriptions. FileDude now has a fabulous system of making the description look good and exactly what the FILE_ID.DIZ meant it to look like (except it's only 5 lines.) Fixed FILES.BBS deletion. Before, it would delete the FILES.BBS before having a chance to upload it. Eek! Fixed FileDude would forget to turn the DOS cursor back on when shelling to DOS. Whoops! Discovered by Lars Hellsten. Fixed FileDude would not account for midnight rollover when calculating the time it took to process. Discovered by Lars Hellsten. Fixed When finding OFFLINE files, FileDude wiped out the extended description. Discovered by Robert Kennedy. Fixed SHARE support. FileDude now has _much_ better SHARE support in general. It acts much "smarter" now, turning off certain features whenever it doesn't have the necessary access to the necessary files. Gone Prompting for descriptions. Gone "Press ESCAPE" thing on the unregistered version. Gone Extra long extended descriptions. Sorry, folks -- I began writing this version to only handle what Renegade itself can handle. That means the stupid four line limit. I don't rule this feature out for future versions, since someone did submit a better way of naming the duplicate entries. Mod FileDude now defaults to NOT wanting to upload every file in the universe. Whereas before there was an option "Don't Upload," now there is an option to "Upload Ever File in Sight" for times when you feel nostalgic. Mod FileDude now uses RENEGADE.DAT to find FBASES.DAT, EXTENDED.DAT, and all your .DIRs. Mod "Default uploader" is now automatically determined by FileDude as the SysOp name in RENEGADE.DAT. Mod "Fix Points" is now "Fix Credits" to conform to Renegade's new credit system. The credits per K is now automatically determined from the RENEGADE.DAT. Mod When looking for internal description files, FileDude will automatically try to find FILE_ID.DIZ _and_ DESC.SDI. FILE_ID.DIZ overrides DESC.SDI if an archive contains both. Mod FileDude will now find duplicates across ALL file areas, rather than just within one area. Mod The template files now use a new set of FiledudeMCI codes which look more like Renegade's new MCI system. Some codes are the same as Renegade's, some are made up. Mod All .CFG configuration files have been replaced with an integrated editing system accessible in the menu system. You can now edit your CD-ROM, archive, and multiple setups configurations directly inside the menu system. FILEDUDE.DAT is where custom data is stored. FORMATS.DAT is where CD-ROM and archive formats are stored. Mod Configuration of filelist maker and archive conversion is now done in the "Basic Configuration." Mod Most of the menus have been changed. Mod Zillions of cosmetic changes. Mod Registration system completely rewritten. Mod Archive conversion is now so advanced so that it's been reclassified as a ***REGISTERED-ONLY FEATURE***. Added Virus scanning. ***REGISTERED-ONLY FEATURE*** Added Version checking (delete PROG10.XXX if you have PROG20.XXX) ***REGISTERED-ONLY FEATURE*** Added Packing of EXTENDED.DAT. ***REGISTERED-ONLY FEATURE*** Added Fixing of duplicate extended descriptions. ***REGISTERED-ONLY FEATURE*** Added FileDude can now compress your filelist and add a FILE_ID.DIZ description (FILE_ID.ASC is the template). Added Support for Renegade-style FILES.BBS. FileDude will now support padded filenames in ANY CD-ROM/FILES.BBS list, in addition to the regular non-padded filenames. In other words, FILEDUDE SUPPORTS BOTH WAYS! First requested by Ray Smith. FileDude v4.0 released ---------------------- Speed Dramatically increased speed of file lister (if all functional options are off.) On my system, for example, it went from 10 minutes to 52 seconds. On another, it went from 15 minutes to just under 3 minutes. Rem Please remember that SET TEMP= in your AUTOEXEC.BAT will determine where the swap file (which FileDude creates when it drops to DOS for conversion) will be located. Added Word wrapping configuring (especially useful for FILES.BBS importing) in FILEDUDE.CFG. Not on the menu, however. Added Three commandline arguments: /NoMenu Run in automatic mode /Config= Use a configuration file other than default (FILEDUDE.CFG) /TempFiles= Redirect all temporary files to RAM drive Added CD-ROMs are now COMPLETELY supported. FILESBBS.CFG Configuration file for setting up different CD-ROM formats You can now specify a path and file format for each file area (in the "Config Areas" menu) Added Mouse support. Like one someone once said, "It's the '90s - we point and click!" Mod Can now chose which archive-types to convert in "Convert Archive" option Mod Can now produce all three file list type (ASCII, ANSI,AVATAR) at the same time Mod File points setting is now in two parts: numerator and denomenator. The role of each is explained in the "File Points" menu. Added Pulldown menu system! Finally! Added Extra long description support (in FILE_ID.DIZ) If this option is checked in the "Basic Configuration" menu, FileDude will simulate unlimited lines for extended descriptions by allocating extra file entries. BE CAREFUL!! DO NOT TRY THIS UNLESS YOU HAVE BACKED UP YOUR .DIR FILES! (you never know...) Added Configuration file (FILEDUDE.CFG) support. Gone Old commandline system. Fixed SHARE violations. Thanks for Jack Brahce for providing some example C files for doing DOS sharing (these examples were almost impossible for me to find! Argh!) Fixed The program couldn't run on a drive other than where Renegade was located. Fixed ERROR.LOG was popping up everywhere after the program finished. FileDude v3.0 released ---------------------- [End-of-file]