NOTIFY  ¯¯¯¯¯¯    Wazzat ???  Notify is a program designed to detect the creation of certain files in your system. It patches the DOS library open, close and rename functions to do its magic. For example, you could set up notify to detect all creation of .info files. Whenever notify would find a .info file, it would start a program. Any program. In our example, you could automatically delete all .info file whenever the Workbench tries to open one.  How it Works  Notify is strickly a CLI program. You give it a pattern to match and a program to run whenever a match is made. You can stop it by hitting Ctrl-C or sending it a break command (via the CLI command break). The template is: Notify RENAME/s NEW/s APPEND/s Pattern/a Command/a Args/... < From > To The first switches (rename, new, append) tell notify which DOS function to modify. Notify detects file creation, which means either new files, modified files or files that are renamed (new name matches the pattern). Note that the switches are enabling (if you set none of them, nothing will happen !). The pattern doesn't check case (it used to be sensitive) and if an argument contains space (ie: was in quote) it will be passed with quote when the com- mand is invoked. Also, to pass the filename that matched the pattern to the program you put filename in the command line where it would be inserted. It is also important to note that unless you redirect the input and output of the pro- gram launched via the redirection '<' and '>' at the end of the template, it will use the same file handles as the program that created the matched file. (See the examples at the end of this documentation). Notify will put a little program in place of the DOS open, close and rename function. It patches the library safely, thus allowing more than one copy of itself to run at the same time and be stopped in any order. The way I do it is shown in the assembler file DosWedge.asm and should be used to be compatible between us guys (right ?). Note that only file creations and appends and renaming are detected by notify. Also be careful that the program you launch when a match is made does not create or write to a file that notify is looking for. This would create an infinite loop (which would stop without harm (I hope!) when memory runs out...). Reading the file is okay though. Notify needs the arp.library to run (it use ARP's pattern matching) and works only with program that calls the dos.library in a system friendly manner (ie: not directly). Note that the AmigaOS 1.3 original DOS commands do not work with notify because they call DOS directly (against Commodore's own programming rules !). ARP commands work just fine...  Usage Notes  All this seems quite abstract ? Well, here are some uses that Notify can be put to: - Automatic printing of files that are copied to a particular directory: Notify NEW RENAME dh0:Text_Print/* type FILENAME to prt: - Automatic unarchiving of downloaded files: Notify NEW *.lzh lz x FILENAME < NIL: > CON:0/140/640/50/LZH - Automatic deletion of .info files: Notify NEW .info delete FILENAME < NIL: > NIL: - You get the picture... Notify NEW RENAME APPEND *.pic Show FILENAME You must be careful with the path you give to notify. The whole path is used for file matching. To complicate things, some program use the file- names directly, some expand the assigned dirs to their full length and some change their current directory to the path name. Some tricky pattern must be given if you must catch all possibilities, like: Notify NEW (baba:*.txt|dh0:baba/*.txt) show FILENAME  Limitations  Here are some of the limitation of notify: - Command cannot be longer than 255 characters including the filename that may be inserted. - Wildcard matching must also matches the path of the filenames. That may change in future version by expanding locks... (yeah, right). - AmigaDOS 1.3 command do not work with notify, they are not detected because they call DOS directly (hum, hum). - ARP seems to have some problem when lauching execute. The way around this problem is to give the command shell from filename. - Just ask Robert... he'll find more.  NotifyDB  To help you with debugging your script and setting, a debug version of notify was made. It will tell you the arguments it read and will print some useful information to its standard output (which could be redirected) whenever it catches a filename that matches the wildcard pattern. You can make an even more verbose version of notify by compiling the source with the symbol DEBUGALL enabled.  Thanks  I'd like to thanks some people/organisation for helping me with this: - Robert Williamson, beta-tester (been known for torturing programs). - ARP and associates, for a great library.  Author  Pierre Dak Baillargeon 2110 Préville LaSalle, Québec H8N 1N5 ||\\/\||// ||///\||\\