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From: andrew@teslab.lab.OZ (Andrew Phillips)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.tech
Subject: Re: NCD on Amiga?
Summary: NCD unnecessary for Amiga
Message-ID: <1168@teslab.lab.OZ>
Date: 11 Dec 90 06:37:21 GMT
References: <4411@dnlunx.pttrnl.nl>
Reply-To: andrew@teslab.lab.oz.au (Andrew Phillips)
Organization: Technology Evaluation Section, L.A.B., Sydney
Lines: 29

In article <4411@dnlunx.pttrnl.nl> martijn@dnlunx.pttrnl.nl (Reinalda M.) writes:
>Does anyone know if there's a change dir command for the amiga
>like the MS-DOS (bwaah!) Norton Change Dir (NCD). 
>NCD creates an image of the hard-disk directory structure, so it
>can immediately change to a given dir. Well, most of us are unhappy
>enough to work with PC's in the (un)real world so you'll probably know
>what NCD does.

Unfortunately I have worked with MSDOS on and off for 8 years but I
haven't used NCD.  I presume it has a TSR part which stores an image
of the whole hard disk directory structure in memory.  Then the NCD
command itself accesses this so that you can change to another
directory immediately by not having to scan all the disk directories
in the specified path.

Fortunately the Amiga has a different disk format so that it does not
need to scan a whole directory to find an entry.  So when you do a 

    CD \APP\WIN\SYSTEM

under MSDOS, CD has to do three (linear) searches of three
directories.  (If one or more of these directories are very large it
can take a long time.)  On the other hand on the Amiga a similar CD
would not require linear searches (it uses a hash table) and so would
be relatively instantaneous.

So the answer is that the Amiga disk format makes an Amiga NCD unnecessary.
-- 
Andrew Phillips (andrew@teslab.lab.oz.au) Phone +61 (Aust) 2 (Sydney) 289 8712