SLINK Copyright (c) 1989 Thomas G. Hanlin III



SLINK is copyrighted and may only be distributed under the following
conditions:

1) All files (SLINK.BAS, SLINK.DOC, and SLINK.EXE) must be included and must
be in original, unmodified condition.

2) No fee of over $6.00 may be charged. This fee limit does not apply to
access charges for online telecommunication services.


SLINK is a smart LINK shell. It requires a reasonably recent version of
Microsoft's DOS-only LINK utilities (LINK v2.0 - v3.69 should be fine). This
does not include the DOS/Windows LINK utility supplied with the BASCOM 6.0
compiler, among other things. DOS version 3.01 or higher is recommended.


SLINK features:
o Wildcard specifications for the main .OBJ module to be LINKed
o Automatic generation of .COM, .EXE and .SYS files-- goodbye EXE2BIN!
o Deletion of the original .OBJ module if an executable file was
successfully generated
o Production of the smallest possible .EXE files


You may use a wildcard specification for the main .OBJ module to link
multiple programs at a time.

If SLINK determines that an executable should be a .COM or .SYS file, it will
convert the file to that format automatically. EXE2BIN is not required. The
intermediate .EXE file will be deleted if the .COM or .SYS file is
successfully generated.

If SLINK is successful at generating an executable file, it will delete the
main .OBJ module used to create the file, since you will probably not need it
again.

If you do not use the /EXEPACK switch, SLINK will try linking both with and
without /EXEPACK, and will keep the smaller of the resulting .EXE files. It
tries both since the /EXEPACK option sometimes makes a file larger rather
than smaller. SLINK makes sure that you get the smallest .EXE possible.


Just type SLINK without any parameters for a quick "help" display.


Misc notes:

As SLINK does not provide a display of the actual errors encountered on a
bad link, it is not well suited for debugging. If you run into a LINK
error, link the program with LINK rather than SLINK for an error display.

SLINK expects to have all LINK parameters entered on the command line. It
will automatically terminate the command line with a semicolon if none is
entered, to insure that LINK does not ask for missing parameters. This is
necessary since SLINK redirects the output of LINK to NUL and any
questions LINK asks will not be visible to the user.

A future version of SLINK will contain an additional command line
parameter to allow linking files according to their time/date stamp.

The source code to SLINK has been provided for the curious. SLINK was
written using the QuickBASIC 4.5 compiler and an alpha version of the
ProBas 3.1 library.