IBMConv Version 1.2 Documentation. © 1992 D Trollope. The legalities. Permission is granted to distribute this archive provided that: 1. It is not distributed in part, the whole archive must be distributed. 2. It is not used in a commercial environment for commercial purposes. (This could be arranged though...) 3. This notice is included in all copies. 4. Modified copies are marked below with the author name and modification details, and I am notified. 5. All parts of the archive (code,documentation and executables) are © 1992 D Trollope, and although you are quite welcome to examine and make use of it, don't distribute it as yours. 6. If you like the program why not make a donation to the author... This archive is Public Domain though. This version has not been modified by anybody but the original author - D Trollope This doc file has been edited to fit onto this disk. The entire archive is not included - K A Kirk 27/6/92 No liability is accepted for the contents of the archive containing this and other files relating to IBMConv. Use these files at your own risk. The documentation. This is a simple program which will read a text file and convert it to either IBM/ST format, or AMIGA format. To the non techies, this means that extra control codes will be added/removed where appropriate when transferring text files. Using IBMConv. IBMConv has four CLI arguments, there are keywords available to identify them, but they can be ignored. Three arguments must be specified with or without the keywords. These are the FROM, TO, and TYPE arguments. The fourth is an option to stop any output being displayed (except errors). This option is called QUIET: IBMConv [FROM] Sourcefile [TO] Destinationfile [TYPE] Sourcefiletype [QUIET] AmigaDOS file pathnames IBM or AMIGA No output Sourcefile and Destinationfile. These are the files (with optional paths) a) to be read, and b) to be written. The destination does not have to specify a filename. You can give a directory as the destination. You must supply an actual file (including its path) as the source name. IBMConv MS1:Text RAM: IBM The above line will now work in this version, previous versions would have failed. Keywords can now be specified like this: IBMConv FROM MS1:Text TO RAM: TYPE IBM You can now just supply a destination directory without a file. You may however supply the '/' of the directory. This is not needed though. The sourcefile name can be used in the destination directory. WARNING. If you supply a destination file which already exists, or a directory containing a file with the same name as the original file, a warning is given, but the file is overwritten. No confirmation is given. Sourcefiletype This must be either "IBM" or "AMIGA" and is not case sensitive. The QUIET option prevents any output from being displayed during convertion. The only exception to this is if an error occurs. Warnings are not displayed. Again, this is not case sensitive. Examples. To convert an Amiga text file (called Test.txt found in the RAM disk) to IBM format ready for transfer to an IBM disk try the following: IBMConv FROM RAM:Test.txt TO T:TestIBM.txt TYPE AMIGA or IBMConv RAM:Test.txt T:TestIBM.txt AMIGA To do the opposite, convert an IBM text file (called Test.txt found in the RAM disk) that has already been transferred to the Amiga to an Amiga formatted disk, try the following: IBMConv FROM RAM:Test.txt TO T:TestAmiga.txt TYPE IBM or IBMConv RAM:Test.txt T:TestAmiga.txt IBM Bugs in IBMConv. I cannot say that I am aware of any bugs at the moment, but has anybody ever written a bug free program? Besides, this release almost got released with a major bug, 0x0d followed by 0x0a would not get converted when 0x0d was the last character in the buffer and 0x0a being the first of the next buffer. I am confident that this release is bug free, but they could be my fatel last words! Please, Let me know if you find any bugs, providing as much information as possible. My address is given below. If you have any ideas please forward them to me. History. Version 1.0 This was extremely slow, and the IBM/AMIGA option operated differently, it said the file type being written, but I felt that to indicate the source file type made more sense so V1.1 came about. Besides, only I have version 1.0! Version 1.1 A buffer system was added using 2K, in theory speeding up the program, and it did, about 50% faster... I don't claim it to be fast though!! IBM/AMIGA option changed, see above, it now indicates the source file type. A progress report is now given, a full stop appears for every 2K read. If an error occurs during opening a file, a new error message outputting the DOS error number has been added. Version 1.2 This is the current release. Previous code was not overly accurate when referencing LONG variables, not set to 0L, just 0, and displayed using %d rather than %ld. Sorry, This is now corrected. A new buffer system has been employed for source AND destination files, work being carried out in the buffers. The reason behind this is I expected it to be faster than the system in 1.1. Now an 8K buffer is allocated for the source file, and depending on the direction of transfer, a destination buffer of 8K/10K is allocated, and worked upon. This new system is between 9 to 10 times faster than version 1.1. It is quite fast. An example of this is that a file of approx 45K took approximately 1 minute 35 seconds (95 seconds), this version takes approximately 5 seconds! The IBM/AMIGA switch is now case insensative, ie. "Amiga", "amiga", "AmIgA", will all be recognised as "AMIGA". Previous versions were limited to upper case. A new progress report has been employed displaying the number of bytes read and written. An additional feature showing the number of lines processed has been added. I thought it might come in useful. The 'QUIET' option has been added. A warning is now displayed if extra binary codes are found in the file being converted. Contact. If you want to get hold of me, try the following address. 57 FAIR OAK ROAD or EMail me at S15342@UK.AC.PSW.PA BISHOPSTOKE EASTLEIGH HAMPSHIRE SO5 6LF ENGLAND