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From: Ordania-DM@cup.portal.com (Charles K Hughes)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.8bit
Subject: Re: DIRT - a new DIR command
Message-ID: <36231@cup.portal.com>
Date: 26 Nov 90 06:49:50 GMT
References: <35990@cup.portal.com> <36045@cup.portal.com>
  <36148@cup.portal.com> <1990Nov26.012220.2181@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>
Organization: The Portal System (TM)
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Tim Elliot asks:
>Charles K Hughes writes:
>
>>  Is anybody interested in a directory compactor?  It would remove all the 
>>deleted & open for write files from a directory, and then deallocate
>>any extra sectors the directory is using.  Interested?
>
>Couldn't this just be accomplished by copying all the files from one disk to 
>another?  Hmmm....

  Yep, but most people don't have removable harddrives, or a drive that they
can use just for this purpose.  In addition, you can't just say
"copy D1:*.* D2:*.*" if D1 has any subdirectories; you need to use a program
for backing up the harddrive.  Invariably, these programs require that you
put in a floppy disk, pull it out, put in another, ad infinitum.  If you
don't want to make a backup, reformat the drive, and then restore the drive
(taking several hours of attended operation) you can use a compaction program
instead to clean up the harddrive.

>--
>Tim Elliott     Tag@uiuc.edu

Charles_K_Hughes@cup.portal.com