Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!gatech!ncsuvx!ece-csc!rss
From: rss@ece-csc.UUCP (Ralph Scherp)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: REXX archiver (was Re: Sources in text mode please)
Summary: Any interest in greatly expanded rexxsupport.library?
Message-ID: <3580@ece-csc.UUCP>
Date: 15 May 88 17:40:15 GMT
References: <1758@van-bc.UUCP>
Reply-To: rss@ece-csc.UUCP ()
Organization: North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC
Lines: 44

In a previous article (Larry Phillips) writes:
    [discussion about ARC/ZOO etc deleted]
>And now for something completely different. A small ARexx program called
>arcall.rexx, that will recursively go through a directory and rename all
>files, generate a script file while doing so, and ARC the entire kabooble
>into a file called ARCFILE.ARC. The script file created, (a standard
>Amigados script called Exec.me) is included in the ARC, and upon execution,
>will make any necessary subdirectories, and rename all files to their
>original name and position in the directory structure.
>
    [included listing of arcall.rexx deleted]

I like the idea of the REXX program to do this sort of thing.  I started to
put this same sort of program together a while ago, but never got around
to it, mostly because I wanted it to work in all cases and realized that
their were a couple of problems with RexxSupport.library as is.

You use the "SHOWDIR" function to get a directory list.  The one problem
with this is that SHOWDIR returns a complete list of filenames, separated
by spaces.  AmigaDOS filenames can contain spaces [and often do, when 
the files are intended for WBench use rather than CLI]; so parsing out
individual names by breaking up the list returned by SHOWDIR can break
occasionally.

I don't mean this is a flame, just an observation, I'm wondering if their
is a way around this problem.  What I'd really like to see is an expanded
version of the support library which gives access to a lot more of the
Amiga systems.  For instance, ability to query devices, perform wildcard
searches, etc.  For wildcard searches, I was thinking of something like:

     status = opensearch(context,"include:*/*.h")   [...#?/#?.h if you prefer]
to initialize a search, followed by
     filename = search(context)
to get the next filename matching the specified pattern, etc...


At any rate...is there anyone out there who wants to develop a `full-blown'
version of rexxsupport.library?  Or perhaps we can all pool ideas together
and present them to William Hawes so such a library could become part of
the standard AREXX distribution.

Just some deranged ravings to keep you folks amused...

             Mark Lanzo