VBBS AGE... Copyright 1991 By Stephen Vermeulen VOICE: (403) 282-7990 VBBS line 1: (403) 284-2048 VBBS line 2: (403) 284-5625 PO Box 3295, Station B, Calgary, Alberta, CANADA, T2M 4L8. Before you double click the AGE icon there are a few things you will need to do. First use the WorkBench's Info menu item to edit the tooltypes in the AGE icon. You should change the MESSROOT= and KEEPDAYS= tooltypes to suit your system. What is AGE? AGE is a tool to selectively delete old files from the VBBS message tree on your system. This is commonly referred to as an aging process, hence the name AGE. Why does AGE exist? The whole messaging philosophy on VBBS revolves around keeping copies of the message system on the clients' machines. The TERM program retrieves new messages and adds these to the user's machine; the READ program allows the user to read new messages or browse old ones and compose new postings and replys while off-line; and the AGE program allows the user to reclaim disk space by deleting all messages older than a certain amount. AGE is not intended to be run after everytime you have run READ, although you may choose to do so. Rather it is intended to be run once a day or perhaps once a week. In fact you should only run it when the disk the messages are kept on is getting a bit low on space. AGE allows you to keep a preset amount of messages, it is up to you to decide how many days of messages are to be kept on line. A future version of the READ program will allow you to mark good messages as archived, AGE will respect these marks and not delete these messages, in this way AGE becomes a tool with which you can easily preserve the good messages for future reference in the framework that allows you to reply and reference them in the future. For those of you who want to make AGEing completely automatic you can add it to your startup sequence. How to use AGE: FROM THE WORKBENCH: Just check the tooltypes array (in the AGE icon) to see that the entries are correct for your system. The tooltypes that AGE understands are: MESSROOT= set this to the root directory of your local message base, this must be the same as you use in the TERM icon NOTE: this directory must exist, and should not currently contain any files, TERM and AGE will be doing a lot of work here and foreign files might confuse them. KEEPDAYS= set this to the number of days you want to keep files for, files older than this amount will be deleted. KEEPHOURS= set this to the number of hours you want to keep files for, this is an alternative to KEEPDAYS. Big numbers, like 1000 are allowed... KEEPSECS= set this to the number of seconds you want to keep files for, this is an alternative to KEEPDAYS. Big numbers are allowed... There is also a WINDOW= tooltype. If this is present then AGE will open a window and print stats on what it is doing into that window, otherwise AGE runs absolutely quietly. The WINDOW tool type is of the form: WINDOW=CON:x/y/w/h/name for example: WINDOW=CON:0/0/640/200/Age progress... would be a good one to use. FROM THE CLI: NOTE: CLI users may keep the AGE.info (icon) file around because this is used to specify the various parameters that AGE needs to run. This is optional; however, since you can specify the things that AGE needs via the command line. Because CLI users do not like their directories cluttered with .info files, when AGE is started from the CLI it will first look in the current directory for the AGE.info file (if you rename AGE to FarOutAGEr you will need to rename the icon to FarOutAGEr.info as well), if it does not find it there it will then look in the S: directory and if it fails to find it there it will look in the C: directory. Once the tooltypes in the icon have been scanned AGE will then scan its command line and this may be used to override the icon supplied values. The command line syntax is: AGE messroot [-dDAYS] [-hHOURS] [-sSECS] [-q] where messroot is the same path as is specified in the TERM MESSROOT= tooltype. The remaining arguments are optional: -d specifies the number of days to keep: -d5 keeps five days (which is the default). -h specifies the number of hours to keep. -s specifies the number of seconds... -q tells AGE to shut up while processing. ---------------------------- CHANGES -------------------------------- 2 Fixed a bug in calling this from the CLI. Improved the algorithm, used to leave some empty directories around (these would be killed in the next sweep), does a clean job now. 1 First release of AGE. ----------------------------- THANKS --------------------------- Another round of thanks go to the AMiga Users of Calgary (AMUC) for their loan of two modems and phone lines for testing some of the multi-line facilities.