cleansubboards.doc

NAME
     cleansubboards - Kill unused subboard entries from a CNet/3
     "subboards3" file.

VERSION
     V0.5b - 17-Jan-97

SYNOPSIS
     cleansubboards BoardsFile/A,V=Verbose/S

REQUIREMENTS
     - AmigaOS 2.0 (V37) or higher
     - CNet version 3.x (I haven't tested CNet/4 yet but I doubt it would
       work)
     - a little over twice as much memory as your subboards3 file is long

OPTIONS
     BoardsFile/A:  the file containing the subboard descriptions, usually
                    CNet:sysdata/subboards3

     Verbose/S:     turn on debugging output (lots!)

DESCRIPTION
     "cleansubboards" was born out of the necessity to save memory on my
     CNet system. I once had huge loads of Usenet groups on the BBS (over
     300 subboards) but deleted them because few people preferred online
     reading over a real newsreader with UUCP. The problem is that CNet
     only marks these subboards as "killed", but the subboards3 file
     doesn't shrink a byte. The unused entries can't be simply deleted
     because CNet depends on the physical subboard number to build the tree
     of subboards. So the boards have to be renumbered and re-chained,
     that's everything "cleansubboards" does.
     Call it with your subboards3-file as a parameter, it won't overwrite
     it but write to a file with ".new" appended to that name.
     After the file is read, cleansubboards makes two conversion passes:
     one to make a new array of all active subboards and a table of
     information on which subboard number in the old file corresponds with
     which in the new one. The second pass does the rechaining and
     replaces the "Child", "Parent" and "Next"-Fields of the subboard
     structures according to the renumbering table.

BUGS
     None known.

HISTORY
     V0.1-V0.4         : First testversions, none actually functional
     V0.5b  (17-Jan-97): Decided to release it because it seems there's no
                         such tool available yet. Well, it's really basic
                         but does the job...

TODO
     - maybe a repair-function that can "guess" damaged links?

AUTHOR
     Matthias Bethke
     Giessener Strasse 31
     35457 Lollar
     Germany
     AmigaNet : Matthias Bethke@39:176/208.0
       Usenet : sysop@sweetdreams.lahn.de

COPYRIGHT
     No! Do with this piece of code whatever you like. Would be nice if you
     sent me an email if you use it though!
     BTW, I didn't include the source (SAS/C) because it's not very nice :-)
     Just ask if you want to hack away at it yourself.