-------------------------------------------------------- WBx - The Workbench Xtractor -------------------------------------------------------- 0. Legal Stuff -------------- WBx was written by Hans-Jörg Frieden, of DIgital DImensions. WBx is © 1995 by DIgital DImensions. WBx may be freely distributed in any way, as long as it is not sold as a separate product. It may be included in PD/Shaerware Collections, including CD-Roms, as long as a nominal fee is charged. Explicit permission is granted to Fred Fish for inclusion into the FreshFish/GoldFish CD-Roms series or any CD-Rom he may be producing, as well as the Aminet CD-Rom series. You are free to use it as you see fit. Read the disclaimer below. To contact DIgital DImensions, write to: Hans-Joerg Frieden Thomas Frieden Schloßstraße 176 Schloßstraße 176 54293 Trier 54291 Trier Germany Germany ++ (0) 49 651 66410 ++ (0) 49 651 66410 Internet: Internet: hfrieden@explorer.uni-trier.de tfrieden@explorer.uni-trier.de inf01@uni-trier.de inf02@uni-trier.de hfrieden@treveris.uni-trier.de tfrieden@treveris.uni-trier.de Disclaimer: Neither the author nor DIgital DImensions can be held responsible for any damage caused by the use or abuse of this product, even if the damage was a direct consequence of programming errors within the program. You use this program completely at your own risk. There's no warranty. To sum it up: IT WASN'T MY FAULT!!!! Source code is not included with the program. If you need it, you may contact us (EMail please). Suggestions, Bug reports, and general opinions should be sent to one of the addresses above. If you find this program useful, please let me know. 1. What is this, anyway? ------------------------ WBx is a small utility (~12 KB) to extract archives from the workbench. WBx offers three possibilities to specify the command with which the extraction will be done. The motivation for writing this program came when I got the Amiga PLUS CD-Rom. Lots of archives on them, and no menu program or navigator to let you unpack them. Furthermore, the included Zoom program didn't quite work on my machine, so I had to go to Shell all the time to unpack the stuff. Since I am quite lazy, I wrote this program. WBx comes completely free of charge, and I would really like to see it become the default tool of may archives. It even saves you the problem of writing script files to unpack archives. 2. Starting WBX --------------- WBx must be invoked from Workbench, and it must have exactly one argument. There are many ways for invoking programs from workbench. Basically, this is: a) Click once on the WBx icon, hold down shift and double- click on an archive's project icon b) Enter WBx as a default tool into an archives project icon. c) Enter WBx as a default tool into any def_xxx.info project icon. This requires that you have something like 'Icon' or 'deficons' running. You could also use a dock program like ToolManager, but make sure that this dock program can launch programs as if they are launched from workbench. ToolManager does this job. 3. Using WBx ------------ Regardless of the way it was launched, WBx will pop up a window, which will look roughly like this: +---------------------------------------------------------+ | Commandline: [ ] | | Extract from Archive: [ blah.lha ] | | Extract to: [ RAM: ] (Select) | | | | ( Extract ) ( Cancel ) | +---------------------------------------------------------+ ( [ ... ] stands for a string gadget, (...) for a button ) The "Commandline:" parameter contains the command line which will be invoked as soon as you press the "Extract" Button. The term "" means that this command line will be taken from the config file, i.e. there wasn't a tool type 'CMDLINE' in the icon (we'll get to Tool Types later). You may enter your own command line here if you must, but generally this won't be needed. "Extract from Archive:" is the archive name. You should not change this field in any way. It is mainly provided for the case that an archive program must specify the archive name in a different way, i.e. a programm that would search xxx.lha.lha if you specify xxx.lha. I don't know of such a program, but... "Extract to:" specifies the target path where the archive will be extracted. You can change this with the "Select" button, which will pop up an asl directory requester. NOTE: Some programs, like lha, require that the path ends with a ':' or '/'. WBx automatically adds a colon or slash if there wasn't one entered. For DMS types programs, you can enter a device like DF0: here. Pressing "Extract" starts the extraction. "Cancel" or the window's close box simply exit. 4. Specifing the command line ----------------------------- 4.1 Tool Types WBx supports a set of three Tool Types, which must be specified in the project's icon. These are: CMDLINE= A complete commandline to be executed by WBx. There are two "joker" characters available, %a and %p. %a inserts the name of the archive in the final command line, %p does the same with the target path. For example, a CMDLINE tooltype for the well-known LHA program would look like this: LHA x %a %p These jokers may also be used in the brainfile (see below). Note also that the CMDLINE tool type overrides any entry in the brain file. FILETYPE= The type of the referenced archive. A filetype may be up to four letters in length. Given a filetype, WBx searches its brain file for a matching entry, and uses this file type's command line. Note that file types are case sensitive. DEFPATH= Independent of the two above, you may also give a default path other than "RAM:". This tool type works independently from the two above, and is useful for DMS-type programs that want a device as the target. Simply specify DEFPATH=DF0:, and DMS will write to the floppy. 4.2 Brain file When no CMDLINE is given in the icon, the brain file is searched for. There are two possible sources of information for the file type which is sought. First, as noted above, a FILETYPE can be specified in the icon. Failing this, WBx chops off the extension of the file, capitalizes it and uses this as a filetype. For example, an archive named 'blah.lha' would be converted to filetype LHA. This means that for this feature to work, you'll have to specify your file types all in caps... Anyway, the brain file, which must be named 'ENV:WBx.config', will have to look something like this: ; WBx Brain file LHA sys:bin/lha x %a %p DMS sys:bin/dms write %a to %p ZOM sys:bin/Zoom from %a to %p ZIP execute s:UnZip %a %p SFX %a %p Lines which start with either a ';' or a blank are considered comments. All other lines are in the format FILETYPE CMDLINE, where FILETYPE is the type of the file, extended to four characters, i.e. fill the rest with blanks. CMDLINE must start at column 6 (look at the above example for clarity). Within the CMDLINE, the same joker characters can be used as was stated with the CMDLINE tool type. Make sure to save your brain file to ENVARC: too, or changes you've made will not survive reset.