Introduction III
Pressing = produces the startup/status display, as shown below. The Ins, Plus,
and Minus keys can be pressed to enable setting the states of the SLTOI (Set
Last Target On Ins), SLTOP (Set Last Target On Plus),
and CTOM (Clear Targets On Minus) flags.
The fixed memory items are shown in the FIXED MEM area, labeled D (Disks),
L (Levels), E (Entries), and T (Targets). The two values for each are the
numbers of items on two lists for which memory is fixed. The first list is
that of the reserved items, and the second is that of the items which have
been cut from the list and from which a memory block is made available for
re-use. The second set of values cannot be edited; also, these values will
be zero if no items are currently dropped from the list or the memory has
been reused.
The 'F' key allows editing both the startup values and the current values
for the counts of items to be held on their reserved lists. Pressing 'F'
produces the following display:
Whether you press 'Y' or 'N' you will still see a similar-looking list of
values to be edited, although the numbers will probably differ. Pressing
'Y' leads to the following:
The message "EDITING STARTUP VALUES" indicates that values are to be written
to the configuration file on exit from DBE, and these values will be the
numbers of items reserved when you start DBE again. Pressing 'D', 'L', 'E',
or 'T' at this point allows you to enter a number from 0 to 255 which will
become the new number of entries of the corresponding type (Disk, Level,
Entry, or Target) that will be taken from the available memory at startup
and placed on the reserved list, if there is enough memory for them.
If you had answered 'N' to the prompt, the message "EDITING CURRENT VALUES"
would be present, and this would indicate that the number which you enter
will become the number of items of the corresponding type currently being
held on the reserved list. If a lesser number than the current value is
entered, items will be removed from the reserved list and placed on the
fixed free list for that item type, and they can be used at any time by
DBE functions which need them (the number to the right of the colon will
increase to indicate the new length of that fixed free list). If you had
entered a larger value than the current, the number to the right of the
colon would not change because the memory for reserving entries comes from
the free memory block and not from any of the lists.
Below, the Insert key has been pressed, and the prompt to set the SLTOI flag
has appeared. Pressing Space or Esc cancels changing this value.
Pressing the Plus key would produce the following:
Here, if 'P' is pressed, the state of the SLTOP flag would change to "Prompt"
as shown below:
Pressing 'B' to set the BACKUP directory produces the following prompt:
If we want to have a date/time value as part of the directory path, we would
press F2 or F3. If we press F3, the following indicator would appear:
Note that the actual time of the GO is not yet known; but if we had opted
to use the start time instead and pressed F2, we would see:
Here, the date and time are filled in; and note that the start time is a
couple of hours earlier than the present time indicated at the top of the
screen.
Below, Space was pressed to exit the status display and then 'O' and '\' were
pressed to get to the drive record table display. Note the question mark
next to the disk name.
The red triangle is above the drive letter C, which is blue, whereas the
letter E is gray, signifying that it is known to have been recently active.
Drive C has not yet been checked, nor has it been scanned, so its letter is
blue. Below, next to the drive letter E, the disk name is in cyan, which
denotes a drive record (DR) table entry which was added to the list but has
not been checked. When the DR status display is started, a check is made
to determine, for each memory list Disk entry, whether its associated drive
is active. This results in a check being made to determine whether the
disk in that drive is in fact the same as the one found on the memory list;
and although the DR table's current status for that drive isn't automatically
updated, a disk which has been scanned will appear in the DR table by
default.
If the DR display had appeared in response to a condition during copying
when the "wrong disk" is in a drive, a question mark would have appeared
beside the disk name in the lower right-hand corner. That signifies that
pressing '?' will initiate a scan of the drives for that particular Disk
on the memory list, whether it is already shown in the drive record table
as associated with a different drive or not.
If '?' is pressed now, we would see:
Now the question mark has been replaced with the E drive letter, the red
triangle has moved to the E, and below, the E drive letter is yellow and
the disk name is highlighted, with the DiskID in green and the volume
label in bright cyan (these colors indicate a DR table entry known to be
active).
Also, two gray entries are shown next to the C and D drive letters, which
indicate drive checks found both DiskID and volume label entries on the
drive while looking for the KINGSTON.1 disk during the '?' search. These
are gray to indicate that the memory list does not currently have any
Disk entries associated with those drives.
If we move the red triangle using the left arrow key to the C drive letter
and press Enter, we see the following:
Here, the C drive letters have turned to gray to indicate an active drive,
but not to yellow. If we press Space to exit from the DR display and then
'O\' to restart it, we see:
The only changes are that the red arrow is now over E again and the '?' is
back again.
If we press ^C to add a Disk entry to the memory list, the DR table will be
updated, and we will see:
If we press '\' as indicated by the LOCATE DISK prompt, the SelectLevel
display will appear, and we will see:
Using PgDn to move through the list of Disks/Levels, we reach the following
entries:
There is an entry for the disk and its root directory on the memory list,
but no subdirectories. There's only one way to add a disk entry to the
memory list without adding any subdirectories found in the root directory;
and this is it (using the DR table).
Note the bright dot next to the TMP5 directory name. This indicates that
a directory has a long filename differing from its short 8.3 format name.
If we press the down arrow and then '?' we see the following:
The long filename is shown at the bottom of the display. If we would turn
the ScrollLock toggle on, the LFNs would be continuously displayed as long
as we used the left/right arrow keys to move the selection bar.
In the following, ^D has been used to add a disk entry for drive D, and
after '\' was pressed, the 'F' was pressed:
Pressing '/', the selection bar moves:
Since this is the end of the list, Home is pressed to start at the top,
and we see:
Pressing '/' to move through the list, we see what typing in a single 'F'
character finds as a search string:
Thus, finding a particular directory is only a matter of thinking up a
scheme for names such that short character sequences can uniquely identify
them. That isn't the hard part, though. The hard part is remembering
to use your chosen portions of their names when you're running DBE.
In the following, CapsLock has been turned on before starting a directory
scan using the ':' key, which reads the filenames in the current directory
and all of its subdirectories. Because of CapsLock, DBE pauses before
performing the scan, showing the scan flags governing whether entries
will be cleared from the list or their status bits reset.
Note that the Scope is SubsScope and the ScanType is ScanSubs, and none of
the indicators are highlighted for the scan statuses. This means that no
entries currently on the memory list will be affected by the scan (if they
were copied and their tag field says "OK", for instance, that will not be
changed, nor will their Copied bits.
Proceeding with the scan by pressing Space (or any other key but Esc),
the memory list will have quite a few subdirectories containing files.
In the following, AltA has been pressed to begin an Associate operation
of the files in the current level with all files in its sublevels. When
AltA is pressed, we see:
Pressing 'P' to indicate that we only want to associate files in the current
level (PathScope), we see:
The prompt above indicates that we should move the selection bar to the
level where the files are found which we want to make the association to,
and since those files are in subdirectories of the highlighted level, we
just press Enter or '\'; and the following prompt appears:
Since we want to include all sublevels of E:\GM, we press 'S', and we then
see:
We are now back at the main file list display, but Associate mode is on,
as evidenced by the absence of a selection bar in the opposite window,
as well as by blank spaces in the current window. The files which began
the Associate operation are marked with blue blocks, and the files
they have been associated to are marked with magenta blocks.
Moving the selection bar down to STOT.PAS and pressing Enter three times,
we see the following three directory displays:
From this, we can quickly assess, from file sizes and dates, where certain
files or groups of related files are, or determine where particular versions
are likely to be found. It's better than trying to navigate from one
directory to another finding candidates while jotting down the dates/sizes
of ones we think are probably elected.
If at this point we press '-' (not the keypad Minus key, the one above the
text area of the keyboard), a green block shows up next to the filename at
the bottom of the screen:
And if we press Enter, instead of seeing the level containing the next
file associated with it in the current window, we see the Selected list there:
Pressing 'S' to select more files, we see:
Once again, we press 'S' to select with SubsScope, which will include all
of the subdirectories of E:\GM. The default SelectorSet is shown at the
bottom of the display:
The filename specification is '*.*' and the current SelectorSet contains
only the <AllSel> qualifier (for which "<ANY FILE>" is being displayed).
Pressing the right arrow key to include the file extension (which for the
current file is ".PAS"), we see:
The SelectorSet has changed to only include the <NameSel> qualifier (for
which "<FILENAME>" is displayed), and the filename specification has
changed to "*.PAS".
Pressing 'D' to set a <DateSel> qualifier, we see
The date-time "10-17-10 05:43" isn't what we want, so we press 'S' to set
the date to another value:
And in the next two views we see the diamond cursor blinking on and off:
After entering enough of the digits to change the date-time to "10-15-10
00:00", we wind up back at the date qualifier prompt again.
Here, we press the right arrow key to add the <PostSel> qualifier (for which
"<AFTER>" is displayed).
Pressing Enter for "OK" and then pressing 'T' to set tag qualifiers, we
see:
Not wanting to select files we have already tagged for some other operation,
we press 'U' for UNTAGGED, and see that "<NOTAG>" is displayed in the
selector set:
That's OK, so we press Enter:
We only need a week's worth of files to look at, so pressing 'U' to
unselect some, we see:
The word CANCEL instead of SELECT is shown, and below it, the SelectorSet
contains only <CANCEL>. We want to unselect only files after the 24th of
the month, so we press 'D' to set the date qualifier:
<DATE> has appeared in the SelectorSet, and we press 'S' to change the
qualifying date:
Entering "25" and two "00" numbers and pressing the right arrow key, we see:
The SelectorSet is now displayed as "<CANCEL><DATE><AFTER>", and that's good
enough, so after pressing Enter:
We're ready to unselect; so pressing Enter again, we see:
There is apparently only one .PAS file from the week of 10-17 to 10-25 that
year which is found in subdirectories of this path.
To check that, we can select all of the .PAS files and then press AltT to
sort them by file time. Then we see that the only .PAS files having dates
close to the week 10-17 to 10-25 are one from 10-14 and a few from 10-29.
So obviously the files we thought we had from that week are elsewhere, or
never existed.
The Design Philosophy
A Scenario
Drive Letters
Key Diagrams