Compare was written by: Leland C. Sheppard Sheppard Software Company 4621 Luneman Road Placerville, CA 95667 CIS ID: 70574,2146 from the Internet: 70574.2146@Compuserve.com The Compare program is shareware. If you use the program regularly and are interested in having us continue to develop it and other such programs, you should register the program with us. You may register Compare for $4.00. In order to register, fill in the Register.Txt form, make out a check payable to Leland C. Sheppard and mail both to the address shown above. If you are interested in the Utility Pack and you have a Compuserve ID and you prefer to register online, simply Go SWREG and register #6193 for UTLPAR.ZIP or #6194 for UTLPAK.ZIP. Because of price constraints on SWREG, only the Utility Pack can be registered online; individual programs may be registered directly with us as described in the preceding paragraph. Please note that this file can be accessed either from the Sheppard Utilities folder or by pressing F1 when Compare is active and has the focus on the desktop. Compare was written in VX-REXX 2.1 and requires the VX-REXX 2.1 (or higher) runtime module (VROBJ.DLL) in order to function. Also, REXX and REXXUTIL must be installed on your system; both REXX and REXXUTIL come with OS/2. File CMPARR.ZIP contains the VROBJ.DLL module; file CMPARE.ZIP does not. Only one copy of VROBJ.DLL is required for all of the VX-REXX programs on your system; if you have previously downloaded a copy of it, you do NOT need to download it again. HOW TO OPERATE Compare: Compare will compare any two files. If the file types do not match, a warning message will be issued; press ENTER to proceed. If a file is not recognized by Compare as a text file, it will be handled as a binary file and divided into 60 byte/character chunks. Text files are compared line by line with the end of a line being defined as the occurrence of a CRLF (Carriage Return character/Line Feed character) combination. You can start the program from an OS/2 command line with parameters of the fully qualified file names of the files to be compared. Double click on the upper left corner of the window or press Alt-F4 to close the window. You can also define a program object pointing to Compare.EXE. If you specify, "[Enter File Names]" in the parameter line, OS/2 will ask you to specify the file names when you start Compare. If you specify the directory containing Compare as the working directory, Compare will be able to find this file when you press F1. NOTE: The enclosed Install.Cmd file will define a folder, the program object, the appropriate parameter line and the working directory for you. If you start Compare without file names, file dialog windows will be presented automatically to help you select the files to be compared. Once both files have been selected, the comparison will proceed automatically. After the first comparison, you can change either or both files being compared by pressing the appropriate Change File button (CF1 or CF2). When you have selected the new file or files, press the Compare button to initiate a restart of the comparison. You can halt the processing of Compare at any time by checking the "Stop compare" checkbox; pressing the Compare button will restart the comparison. LIMITATIONS: This program will take ALL available CPU time when it is comparing large files. It can also take all available memory as both files are read completely into memory. Performance on your system may become very sluggish while files are being read into memory and while the comparison is going on. If the files are large and your system has small memory (less than 16mb), you may see a lot of activity to the swapfile. When scrolling through the boxes looking at file differences be careful to use only the arrows on the scroll bars to move the view. If you click inside the window, you will change the highlighting. Thank you for your interest in our software. Leland C. Sheppard, 2-17-1997 Version 1.3 Changes from version 1.2 to 1.3: Turn off VX-REXX console window. Changes from version 1.1 to 1.2: "Stop compare" checkbox added to allow program to be interrupted during large file comparisons. Changed program to continually display operation being performed (reading file, comparing files, etc.); with prior versions it was difficult to tell when program had finished. Changes from version 1.0 to 1.1: Fix comparison so that zero length strings do NOT show as different. (c) Copyright Leland C. Sheppard, 1995. All rights reserved.