IniMaint Copyright 1992, 1993, 1994 by Carry Associates IniMaint is an OS/2 PM program to display and manage *.INI files and is distributed by Carry Associates, 990 Ironwood Court, Marco Island, FL, 33937-4458. Telephone number is 813-642-9126. The application was written by and is supported by Larry J. Martin. You can obtain Technical support by calling the number above, by leaving an Email on Compuserve for 72662,3616 or for the same ID in the OS2AVEND Forum Section 1. The cost for IniMaint is $29.95 for a single user license and $299.00 for an unlimited corporate license. There is a $7.00 shipping and handling charge to ship a diskette. Payment can be made via a check drawn on a US bank, we will invoice against a corporate purchase order or we will charge either a Visa or MasterCard credit card. WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING IniMaint gives you the ability to make virtually any change you want to any of the INI files in your OS/2 environment. Making changes to these files must be done with care because you can do serious and unpredictable damage to your environment. It is STRONGLY SUGGESTED that you insure that you have a usable backup of any INI file that you modify in any way. WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING The enclosed is a Version 3.1 of IniMaint and has the following known problems and/or incomplete features: 1. The Initial Dialog cannot be dismissed using the Enter Key, the Mouse must be used. 2. If the Groups Dialog is displayed, a new Group is selected and then OK is selected without actually making any changes to any of the Groups or the Applications in a Group, then the Last Group Displayed is not updated and a subsequent use of the Groups Dialog will revert back to the previous Last Group. 3. There is no Help available for the standard OS/2 New File Dialog. REPORTED COMMENTS OR PROBLEMS The following items are problems that have been reported, but cannot be reproduced or comments that I have received from one or more users. Any assistance on the problems or additions to the comments is more than welcome. 1. It was pointed out that although the Cursor in the Value MLE can be an Insert Cursor, there is no way to Insert information. My response is that the only way to change the length of a Value is by using the Replace Value Dialog because changing the expected length of an INI Key Value can cause unusual and unexpected errors. I further responded that the only way to change the cursor is to change it System wide, therefore, changing it only when it is in the MLE is a non trivial problem and I have not attempted to do it even though it leaves the apparent conflict between the appearance of the Cursor and the actual effect when a key is depressed. INSTALLATION To install the this version you must: 1. Run the INSTALL.CMD file that is on the supplied diskette and follow the instructions. 2. You may optionally add IniMaint to one of the Groups on your Desktop. 3. You may optionally add the entry: SET INIMAINT= to your CONFIG.SYS file specifying the path and filename of an INI file that you want IniMaint to use to store it's operational information. If this entry is not found in the Environment, IniMaint will store it's operational information in the OS2.INI file. OPERATION To run IniMaint simply start it by clicking on the IniMaint.EXE file or start it from the Group to which it has been added. When IniMaint first comes up, it will default to editing the INI file that is identified by the system as the user INI file. This is normally C:\OS2\OS2.INI. The name of the current file is always displayed in the TITLE bar of the main window. IniMaint can also be started with an initial INI file specified on the command line. This allows IniMaint to be started with a new file by using the command line, but also allows for it to be started by dropping a file on the ICON on the desktop or double clicking on an INI file, once the association is set up. IniMaint will locate the window in a default location, but you can move and or size the window as you choose. When IniMaint is shut down, it will remember the file that it was currently working with as well as the size and location of the window and will restore all of these the next time it is run. There are a number of IniMaint functions which will take some time to execute. For example, the maximum length Key Value that IniMaint will load into the Key Value Window is 60,000 bytes. Since each line only displays 8 bytes, this comes to 7,500 lines and it takes well over a minute. There are other similar types of functions, although the example is the longest. During these long operations, it is not possible to do any other IniMaint operations. However, the long functions are done in separate threads and the Message Queue is not blocked, therefore it is possible to go do some other, non-IniMaint, function during this time. In addition, since there are a number of reasons why a user might not want to wait until the lengthy function is completed, for example, it might have been selected in error, any IniMaint operation that takes a long time and displays the Wait Pointer can be terminated by hitting the ESC key. IniMaint will normally store the current operating information such as the size and position of the windows, that INI file that is currently being edited and a large number of other items, in the User INI file, OS2.INI. This is sometimes not a convenient location, since this file gets completely replaced when a new version is installed and a problem with the OS2.INI file would mean that IniMaint would not run. IniMaint will use a different INI file and will create the file, if necessary, if an Environment Variable INIMAINT= is placed in the CONFIG.SYS file or in a CMD file that executes IniMaint. For example, if the user wanted IniMaint to use the file INIMAINT.INI in the C:\OS2\APPS subdirectory, they would code: SET INIMAINT=C:\OS2\APPS\INIMAINT.INI GETTING STARTED If you did not obtain your copy of IniMaint to address a specific problem or you are not familiar with INI files and the kinds of things that IniMaint allows you to do with them, then it is strongly suggested that you review the Getting Started entry in the Help file along with the other General Help subjects. MAIN WINDOW DESCRIPTION The Main Window contains three standard child windows. Two of these windows are Listboxes and the third is a MLE. The upper left Listbox will always contain the list of Applications for the current INI file. The upper right Listbox will contain the list of Key Names for the Application that is currently selected in the Application Listbox. The MLE, at the bottom, will contain the hex and ASCII display of the contents of the Key Name that is selected in the Key Listbox. The Cursor will normally be forced to the MLE and the value of the data can be modified by changing either the hex or the ASCII fields of the MLE. The cursor cannot be moved to any portion of the MLE that does not contain data that can be modified and any modification to one type of data, hex or ASCII, will immediately be reflected in the other data. The actual data in the INI file is not changed until the user selects the Update Item on the Action Menu or selects a different Key or Application in the same INI file. At this time, you will be asked to confirm that you want the INI file modified, unless you have turned the warning option off, see below. IniMaint POPUP MENUS In addition to the standard menu entries described below, each window has a Popup Menu that will appear when the standard action is taken, clicking once with the Right Mouse Button is the default. Each of the three primary windows has its own Menu and the Menu will contain those items which are general to the entire Application and those that apply to the entries in that particular window. Most of the items on these menus are discussed below, however, there are three items on each menu that are unique to the Popup Menus and they are: 1. Explain will attempt to give the user an explanation of the meaning of the currently selected Application and Key. Not every Application will have an explanation, but an attempt has been made to explain all of the standard OS/2 entries as completely as possible. 2. Write Window to a File will cause the entries in the window in question to be written to a file, so they could be reviewed without IniMaint running. 3. Print Window will cause the entries in the Window to be printed on the default printer. IniMaint MENU OPTIONS The various IniMaint Menu options are: 1. File gives the user the ability to change INI files, refresh the current INI file, Dump the contents of the IniMaint variables, compare two INI files and Exit from IniMaint. The Compare option allows the user to Compare two INI files on any one of three different levels: A. List Applications that are in one INI file, but not the other. B. A. above plus any Key Names that are in one file, but not the other. C. A. and B. above plus any Key Values that are in both files, but are not equal. The differences are displayed in a Listbox within a Dialog that allows the user to print or write a listing of the Listbox contents and/or create an INI file with some or all of the Applications or Keys that have differences. 2. Options will display a Dialog that gives you the ability to: A. Turn off the display of the opening IniMaint Dialog. B. Turn off the dialogs that will ask for confirmation before Deleting or Modifying the contents of the Current INI file. 3. Groups will display a Dialog that allows you to define and manage the various Groups for this INI file. A bit of explanation is needed here. IniMaint gives the user the ability to arrange the applications in any INI file into Groups. These Groups can then be used in a number of different IniMaint areas and greatly ease the problems of handling an INI file with a large number of applications. For example, the OS2.INI file might be divided into two Groups, System and Private. The System Group would be the applications put in the file by OS/2 Install and the Private Group would be the remaining applications. More or fewer Groups could be defined. How the user can use Groups within the IniMaint structure will become more clear below. The Groups Dialog gives the user the ability to define new Groups, to add and delete Applications and Delete Groups. The procedure for establishing a new Group is to select Groups in the Group Dialog, select New Group, and supply a name. Once this is done, the Title of the Dialog will show the current Group and the new Group will be added to the Group Menu. You add Applications to the Group by selecting them in the Listbox. The Listbox will display a specific Group or, if you want to know if there are any Applications that are not in a Group, will display all Groups. A single Application can be a member of up to 5 different Groups at any one time, so it is possible to define overlapping Groups. 4. Size will calculate the minimum amount of Disk Space that would be required for an INI file that contained a selected set of Applications in the current INI file. When this item is selected, the user will be asked what he wants to Size. There will always be several choices, the various standard INI files, the current file and the currently selected Application. If there are any Groups defined, then they will be included among the selections. If there are more than one Group defined, then there will be an All Groups selection. 5. Actions gives the user the ability to do a number of things: A. Update Current Key will write any changes that have been made to the data in the MLE into the current INI file. B. Delete Application and Delete Key will do the obvious. C. Add Application, Add Key and Replace Key Value are all the same function except entered at different points. Add Application will ask for the name of a new Application to add to the current INI file and then fall through to the Add Key, since the Applications must have at least one Key. The Add Key will ask for the name of the new Key and then fall through to the Replace Key Value, since any Key Name must have an associated Value. This will cause the Key Dialog box to be displayed. The Application and Key Names will be shown at the top of the Dialog, followed by the current length of the data, the ASCII representation of the data and the hex representation of the data. This is the only option that will change the length of a Key Value. Care must be taken when doing this, as many applications depend on knowing the length of the INI items. As the ASCII or hex values are changed, the changes will appear in the other window and the length will be updated. The only exception is when only a single hex digit is entered. The ASCII window is not updated until two hex characters are entered. D. Rename and Duplicate Key give the user the ability to change the name of an existing Key or to make a duplicate copy of the Key using a different Key Name. E. Copy and Move will ask the user to select a Target File for the Copy/Move and will then give the user the same choices as Size above. The selected Applications will then be moved or copied to the Target INI file, which will be created, if it does not exist. This function is done Key by Key, so it will sometimes take some time. However, the PM message queue is not blocked while the move/copy is being done. The actual move or copy is done by a separate program INICOPY, that can also be run as a batch program, see below. F. Backup allows for an easy Backup of the System INI File, User INI File or both the System and User INI Files. Once the user has selected names for the normal backups for the two files, these files will be presented as the default for additional backups. The user can set an Option that will bypass asking the user if he wants to use the defaults. This selection will always delete the target files before doing the backup, which is one of the ways it varies from the Copy selection. 6. Recover contains a list of capabilities designed to give the user the ability to recover from corrupted INI files. These capabilities are: A. Change User and/or System INI Files give the user the ability to change the INI files that OS/2 is currently using to new files. The primary use of this capability is to allow the user to make changes to the User or System INI files that he knows need to be made, but cannot make to the current User or System Files because of protection built into OS/2. Great care must be exercised when doing this, but it will sometimes represent the only way that problem entries can be removed from an INI File. B. Repair inconsistencies between the INI file and the Desktop. C. Condense the Current INI file, the System INI File, the User INI File or both the System and User INI Files. The Condense is necessary because of the way updating is done to the INI files. The updating will leave empty areas in the INI files and these areas tend to get fragmented, thus causing the overall size of the INI file to grow, sometimes grow very large. Condensing the System or User INI files is not a simple task, since they cannot be copied or erased while they are being used by OS/2. This item switches the files to the copies long enough to erase the old files and copy a condensed backup to the original names. The only problem this causes is that it will reset the desktop to the boot desktop. This function is removed for Version 2.1 of OS/2 and beyond, since the handling of the INI files was changed to automatically remove the empty space. D. There are two items to Test for and Reset the condition where the User and System INI files cannot be updated. When this condition is found, the user will be asked if he wants to correct the condition and, if he answers yes, the User and System INI files will get changed so that they will be able to be updated. The process involves making a copy of the INI files and switching to them, so it takes a minute or so and involves resetting the Desktop. 7. Find allows the user to search the Application Listbox, the Key Name Listbox, the Key Value MLE, all of the Key Names in the current INI file, all of the Key Values for the current Application or all of the Key Values in the current INI file for either an Ascii string or a Hex value. INICOPY INICOPY is the program that is used by IniMaint to do the actual COPY/MOVE operations. This option is implemented as a separate program so that the user will have the ability to make copies of INI files, including the User and System INI files, at any time during the day. The parameters expected by INICOPY are: Required Parameters: -Ifilename - The fully qualified path and filename of the Source, Input, INI file. -Ofilename - The fully qualified path and filename of the Target, Output, INI file. The Target will be created if it does not exist. Optional Parameters: -Fx - Function requested - Default is C(opy) C = C(opy) M = M(ove) -E - COPY/MOVE Entire INI file - Default -A - COPY/MOVE All Groups -Ggroup - COPY/MOVE Specific Group -Sapp - COPY/MOVE Specific Application -T - Use Fast Copy. This is only valid if -E is also specified