Category : Communication (modem) tools and utilities
Archive   : DDADD.ZIP
Filename : DDADD.DOC

Dialing Directory-ASCII-Dialing Directory (DDADD)

DDADD converts a Procomm (2.4) or Procomm Plus dialing directory to a
formatted ASCII file. It also converts the ASCII file back to a
dialing directory. (Procomm and Procomm Plus are trademarks of
DataStorm Technologies.)

I didn't like the directory sort program that came with Procomm Plus.
The sort options didn't give me the order I wanted, and wasn't likely
to. For instance, how could it know I want the Ham and Eggs BBS
between between Bread and Butter? The obvious answer was to convert
the directory to a text file, edit it with my favorite text processor
and then convert it back. I got the idea from PRODIR by Scott
Romanowski, but coded DDADD from scratch using Turbo C (Borland
International trademark).

The first argument is the source file and the second argument is the
target file. If either is missing, a help screen will be displayed. A
single question mark argument will also display the help screen. You
may be able to use NUL as the first argument to create a scratch ASCII
file; it works on my system. DDADD complains and returns an error code
of 1 if a file error prevents conversion.

By default the directory format is Procomm Plus. A third argument of
"/24" tells DDADD to use Procomm 2.4 directory format.

Three more optional arguments may be provided to give names to the
Procomm Plus external protocols.

Syntax:

DDADD ?
DDADD source target [/24] [ext1 [ext2 [ext3]]]

If DDADD finds "-DIALING" (without quotes) in the first 8 bytes of the
source file, it attempts to convert from ASCII to directory format. If
it doesn't find those characters, it attempts to convert from directory
to ASCII format. DDADD won't crash if the source file isn't in the
correct format, but the target file contents will probably not be what
you expected.

Except for lines starting with "-Dialing Command:" and "-Long Distance
Code ", DDADD completely ignores ASCII file lines starting with "-".
The Dialing Command marker indicates the dialing command used by
Procomm 2.4 directories, it MUST be the first line of the file for
DDADD to recognize the file as an ASCII file, even if your are
converting to Procomm Plus format. The second marker identifies a line
containing long distance dialing codes. The letter designator is
ignored, the codes are used in the order found.