EASYDISK for DOS


EASYDISK lets you read in disk contents automatically.
File names and directories as well as sizes and dates
are stored in a database DISKS.DBF. You add a name for
each disk and later can add keywords or notes.
 
Running EASYDISK:
the files DISKS.DBF and DISKS.PAR must be in the current
directory when calling EASYDISK;
you can always stop EASYDISK by pressing the [ESC] key;
if you don't provide any parameters EASYDISK expects the
disk to be inserted in drive A: and the filename to be
DISKS.DBF

Alternatively you can provide arguments for the drive
and / or the database.

Examples:

> easydisk
reads the disk contents from the disk in drive A: into
the database DISKS.DBF

> easydisk b:
reads from drive B:

> easydisk PDCOLL
reads from drive A: into the database PDCOLL.DBF. The
latter must have the same structure as DISKS.DBF! You
may omit the file extension "DBF".

> easydisk d: CDROM.DBF
reads from drive d: into the database CDROM.DBF which
must have the same structure as DISKS.DBF


You have to enter a disk name which must be unique. The
name may consist of up to ten characters. If you rather
want to have disk numbers you should edit leading zeroes
to make sure the database can sort your data correctly.
I recommend to either edit a 4-figure number (from "0001"
to "9999") or a name. If you have two drives for 5 1/4''
respectively 3,5'' disks you could also choose names like
"B001" or "A001".

EASYDISK runs pretty fast (reading in a CD-ROM with 4,497
files took not quite a minute, the indexing took another
3 minutes). The program usually does not update the index.
When you have read in several disks you should run the
REINDEX command in EZB. This command then does not reindex
the complete database but only adds new index entries for
the data you have appended.

When you enter the same disk name again, EASYDISK automati-
cally switches to the indexing mode. All former entries as
for this disk will be deleted and the new entries inserted
instead (this is why the names must be unique). The indexing
mode is needed to enable automatic free space management.
The free space management of EZB / EASYDISK can handle up
to 800 records. Therefore you rather should omit replacing
database entries for CD-ROM (the CICA CD-ROM for Windows
contains about 5,000 files). Usually this doesn't make sense
anyway.

You can also enforce the indexing mode by providing an option
'-i'. An example:

> easydisk -i b:
reads in the contents of the disk in drive B: into the DISKS
database and creates index entries as well. This maybe useful
when you only read in one single disk at a time. 

I recommend to keep different copies of the DISKS database for
different purposes. If you want to catalog CDROM-directories
for example you can copy the files:

> copy disks.* cdrom.*

And you always should keep one empty DISKS database.

EASYDISK is a free program and comes with no warranty at all.
I just include it with EZB because it's a quite handy utility.
This version is not compatible with the one which was formerly
distributed in Germany.

Bernd Harmsen
November 1994