There about 3 little freeware TSR programs I know that attempt to
give dos the ability to soft link files to names in other directories,
like Unix does. One is linkln11.zip that does this for execution of
com and exe files -- works file. Another is something like doslnk10.zip
which does this for read. That is, one can create a name for a file
in another directory, and programs can read the name in the other directory,
is if it were opening and reading the real file in its real directory.
I know of no dos TSR that reproduces the Unix ln -s name file ability in
dos for all three of reading, writing, and executing files.
What does this have to do with batch files and disk space? It is well
known that in the FAT16 style partitioning a little batch file of,
say 100 bytes takes up a minimum of one cluster, perhaps 4000 bytes on
the disk -- thus wasting a lot of space.
I know of 2 solutions: but your little batch files in one disk file and
unpack them into an XMS ram disk, each time at start up. Or use a little
program that pulls files out of a single bigger file and executes them
such as:
unzip -d %tmp% batch.zip %1.bat
shift
%tmp%\%1.bat %1 %2 %3
del %tmp%\%1.bat
If you call the above b.bat you execute your batch files with:
b name options
The trick in recovering wasted disk space from little batch files is
making dos think a file is a directory in some way, like the above.
Disk compression utilities like stacker do just this, but this is
an extreme solution to save a little disk space.
I was wondering if some assembler programmer had or would write a little
program TSR like, linkln11, that would intercept the execution interrupt,
and link names of all batch files with the same file, like linkln11 does,
but also pass the original name on. That is a command like:
name <RETURN>
would actually execute, c:\pathname\samefilename name <ENTER>
and samefilename could be a little com program that pulls a batch
file out of a zip archive and executes it. That would make dos
behave like all the little batch files in a single big file were
batch files in a directory -- thus recovering the wasted space.
Any ideas?
i
Howard Schwartz
-------------------------------
theo "at" ncal.verio.com
theo "at" ncal.verio.com
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