@DATABASE "Guide for Troels" @NODE MAIN "Troels 1.0 documentation" ###### ### ###### ## # ## # ## ## ## ### ##### ##### ## ##### ## ### ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ####### ## ### ## ## ## ## ## ## ### ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## #### #### ##### ##### #### ##### by Anders Melchiorsen Version 1.0 - Released on 9-Jun-95 @{" Distribution " Link 0.} @{" Compatibility " Link 6.} @{" What is Troels? " Link 1.} @{" Source code " Link 10.} @{" Installing Troels " Link 3.} @{" Quotes from happy users " Link 12.} @{" Arguments " Link 4.} @{" Author " Link 13.} @{" How Troels works " Link 5.} @{" History " Link 15.} @ENDNODE @NODE 0. "Distribution" Troels is Public Domain. Copy it to your friends, improve your file ratio by uploading it everywhere, include it on CDs, and basically do whatever you please with it. I am just happy if someone likes what I have made. Naturally, with Troels being a Public Domain program, I cannot guarantee that it will work for you, nor can you be sure that I will even try to correct a bug you may find. I can only say that it works for me and that I will MOST LIKELY be happy to remove any reported bugs. If you want to thank me anyway, I would like that very much; check out the @{"author" Link 13.} section for my address. @ENDNODE @NODE 1. "What is Troels?" Troels is a tiny program that I wrote in order to make my work with Spot more pleseant. Specifically, it improves (IMHO) the way Spot imports messages. Troels simply scans your inbound directory for mail bundles (the stuff that ends in .MO0, TU7, and so on) and unarchives them by spawning either LhA or LZX, depending on what the bundle was archived with. Therefore, when Spot gets to import the mail, there will only be .PKT files and consequently the progress indicator will only get filled once instead of once for each of the mail bundles. This makes much more sense to me. As a side effect, if LhA or LZX decides to crash while unpacking mail, Spot's message base will *not* be destroyed -- as is the case if Spot does the unarchiving by itself. Still, if Spot crashes while actually importing (not just unarchiving), your message base will probably end up inconsistent -- but with Troels, the risk is less. Finally, you don't have to specify in Spot what archiver your boss node(s) use; Troels figures this out by himself (as long as it is LhA or LZX). Troels may be useful with other FidoNet applications which access your inbound directory, but that would be entirely by luck. @ENDNODE @NODE 3. "Installing Troels" I suggest putting Troels together with Spot. Troels is a Shell program and does not have an icon and therefore you must move it by hand (hopefully you do not need an Installer script to do that). If you have a registered copy of Spot I suggest using this script as your import ARexx script (call it _Import.spot and put it with the other ARexx scripts). ===== Start of _Import.spot (this line is not included) /* Call Troels to unarchive bundles and then import into Spot */ ADDRESS COMMAND 'MAIL:Troels INBOUND=MAIL:Inbound LHA=LhA LZX=LZX' IMPORT EXIT 0 ===== End of _Import.spot (this line is not included) You will probably need to change the paths, more about this in the section @{"arguments" Link 4.}. A sample ARexx script is included. If you are not a registered user of Spot and thus cannot use ARexx, I suggest you put the call to Troels onto a hotkey using ToolsDaemon, Yak, or similar. This is not quite as convienient but probably the best you can do with an unregistered Spot. Troels should be pure enough to be made resident if you are of the kind which like to do this. @ENDNODE @NODE 4. "Arguments" Troels REQUIRES three arguments: where your inbound directory is, what your LhA is called, and what your LZX is called. The arguments are called INBOUND, LHA, and LZX. INBOUND is the directory where you incoming mail is, usually MAIL:inbound -- the unarchived .PKT files will end here as well. LHA and LZX are the FULL PATH to your packer. Unless it is resident, it will most probably not be enough to just specify 'LhA' or 'LZX'. Do not make assumptions as to what the current directory may be when running Troels through Spot! Even if you do not need/have either LhA or LZX, you need to specify them! Simply use LHA=LhA or LZX=LZX even if the program actually does not exist; Troels will not use the program name for anything until it comes across an archive that needs this archiver. @ENDNODE @NODE 5. "How Troels works" Troels scans the given inbound directory for all files matching the wild card #?.(MO|TU|WE|TH|FR|SA|SU)[0-9] and check each match for a special cookie that both LZX and LhA put in the start of the file to know what kind of archive it is. It then calls the appropiate archiver with this command line: ARCHIVERNAME -x0 x FILENAME where ARCHIVERNAME is what you specified with either the LHA or LZX arguments (depending on archive type) and FILENAME is whatever file Troels is now processing. If the archiver returns an error code that is not 0, Troels will rename the file to FILENAME.bad -- if the archiver does return 0, everything should have been handled correctly and Troels will delete the original file. Troels itself will return an error code of 10 and print an error message if it could not allocate some resource or find the path/file you specified with the arguments, otherwise 0 is returned - even if some archive did not unarchive correctly. @ENDNODE @NODE 6. "Compatibility" Troels was tested with LhA 1.50r and LZX 1.20e; it should work on older LhAs, but I think that the first couple of LZXs had a bug that prevents them from working with Troels. Anyway, this is not checked -- just keep your archivers up to date :-). Troels should run on any Amiga with dos.library version 37 or more (Kickstart 2.04+). @ENDNODE @NODE 10. "Source code" The source (in C) is included for your pleasure. I have learned a lot by looking at others sources and I want to give that chance to others as well. I compile it using DICE do doing this: dcc Troels.c -o Troels.o -2.0 -mi -ms -mRR -c dlink Troels.o -o Troels -r You should be extremely careful if you start playing with the source; I do not use any startup code (in fact, Troels is complely self contained and does not need to be linked with anything) and altering something may destroy it! Be sure to know what you are doing... @ENDNODE @NODE 12. "Quotes from happy users" Damn, I like it! (Anders Melchiorsen) Good move! (Anders Melchiorsen) Totally beats the ARexx script I had written to do the job. (Anders Melchiorsen) @ENDNODE @NODE 13. "Author" If something is unclear to you, if you have suggestions on improvements (to the program, this documentation or anything else) or you just want to send me a postcard or netmail (I would surely like that), this is where you can reach me: Anders Melchiorsen Kirkebyen 5 7950 Erslev Denmark Fido: 2:238/97.9 @ENDNODE @NODE 15. "History" Below is a description of what has changed in the various versions of Troels that have been. Each link describes what changed with that particular version. @{" Version 1.0 (9-Jun-95) " Link 15.1.} @ENDNODE @NODE 15.1. "Version 1.0 (9-Jun-95)" Initial release. How do you like it? @ENDNODE