COLORDIR Revision List (25 Jan. 1990)

version 2.62

- Just a small bug fix. Under any circumstance where return to
DOS did not immediately follow the termination of ColorDir (as
would be the case in batch files), ColorDir would terminate in
the middle of its last line and leave the cursor
mis-positioned. Not any more. My thanks for Alan Powell and
Mike Giroux for letting me know about this.

version 2.61

- There's always another curve in the road. When writing the
function to change the filenames to lower case, I relied on
the fact that DOS always stores them as UPPER case. Well,
Norton's utilities allows you to create volume labels using
lower case. This made ColorDir "encrypt" the volume label.
Thanks for Mike Giroux for finding this bug.

version 2.60

- Added a configuration variable (BO) to allow the border color
to be changed (see COLORDIR.CFG for details).

- Added the ability to configure display for Upper or lower case
display using the UP variable (see COLORDIR.CFG for details).

- Space available and bytes used are now displayed with commas.


version 2.58

- Yet another small problem has surfaced. Steve Margison
found that a hidden subdirectory was displayed as having a
file size of 0. T'was due to a logic error on my part.

version 2.57

- Well it's summer; it's normal for bugs to spoil the fun.
Paul Truzzi informed me of yet another bug in ColorDir. It
seems that if you used the 'sort by extent' on a directory
containing more than 8 subdirectories, you wouldn't get any
display. This is fixed now.

version 2.56

- I've added a new config file toggle called TP. It
determines the default display type (either the standard,
4 column display or the "long" display showing file
datestamps). TP=1 will give a normal display while TP=0
will generate the "long" display. Either condition can be
over-ridden from the commandline using 'L' (long) or 'C'
(compact).

- I've again tweeked the code some and recompiled using
Zortech C v1.07. This resulted in execution times that are
about 10-15% faster than with version 2.55.

version 2.55

- There's just too damn many permutations in the
"drive:\path\filename" system of DOS { grin() }. Claudio
Puviani found yet another possibility not covered by
COLORDIR. If you ask DOS something like "DIR a:" it returns
the directory of the default directory of drive a: which, of
course doesn't have to be the root. COLORDIR used to give
you the root directory with this syntax. Now, if you want
the root directory you need to type "COLORDIR c:\". Typing
"COLORDIR c:" will give you the default directory as it does
in DOS.
- Claudio has also written a small program to allow you to
print the documentation. It's called PRNDOC and is included
in the package.

version 2.54

- John Hutton suggested that I add the ability to display
hidden files. You can now add a HD=1 to your .CFG file if
you always want hidden files displayed OR you can use an 'H'
on the commandline to display those files. Because of this
addition ColorDir must now be able to take four parameters
from the command line. It is now possible to have a
commandline like "COLORDIR \path l e h". Thus, any of you
using either a CED alias or a .BAT file to execute COLORDIR
(like COLORDIR %1 %2 %3) should add a %4 to that command.

- found a small bug in the routine that reads the .cfg file.
While the docs said you could have 30 definitions it quit
accepting them before then. This was fixed and I bumped up
the number of allowable definitions to 50.

- While I was working on the program I added 43 line mode
capability. If your video is set to 43/50 line mode,
COLORDIR will follow suit and give you 43/50 line displays.

- Used TurboC v2.0 to compile this version.

- I also rewrote some of the documentation. This doesn't
really have as much to do with COLORDIR but with principle.
My old documentation stated that I wrote & released this
program in the spirit of the days when people wrote
programs and gave them away. I stated that while I support
the shareware concept I still felt there was a place for
small FREE utility programs. Well, there's a company
(Moorshead Publishing) in Canada that "sells" my program on
a disk with 11 others for $20. They claim they are covering
their costs. They get away with this, I'm sure, by paying
themselves advertising fees (they own the magazine where
they place multi-page ads). Since all the other companies
doing this can "cover their costs" for $4 - $6 I find this
downright distasteful. Thus, ANY distribution of version
2.54 or greater of my program where there is a charge for
the disk is STRICTLY PROHIBITED. This is NOT a "public
domain" program (that's what Moorshead calls it) and this
is clearly stated in the documentation.

version 2.53

- Robert Fielder pointed out to me that when sorting by date,
ColorDir didn't sort by time if two files had the same date.
It does now!

version 2.52

- Not again?? Yeah, I screwed up again. I've found and fixed
another bug in the commandline parser. The condition
COLORDIR \
resulted in no directory display. This has been corrected.
Hopefully this is the last creepy crawler in this program.

version 2.51

- I can't believe it but another bug has crept into the code.
When I implemented the commandline toggles for all that sort
stuff I didn't see the problem in using 'd' for the 'date'
toggle. Well, if you use the syntax COLORDIR D: you want
something besides a date sort of the current directory.
With egg on my face (AGAIN) this version corrects the
problem. Sorry for the inconvenience.

version 2.5

- program was ported from Turbo C to Datalight C ver. 3.14.
This reduced the size of the program by nearly 3k.

- I use some of those bytes to implement sort options. By
placing a [n,e,s,d] on the commandline you can sort by
Name, Ext, Size, or Date respectively. This must appear as
a separate parameter on the commandline but may be used in
conjunction with the 'l' command to give the "long" display
format. Thus
COLORDIR \path l s

will generate a long display sorted by size. The order of
the 'l' and 's' parameters is not important but the '\path'
must be the first parameter is a path is designated.

- default sort type can be configured from COLORDIR.CFG. See
README.COM or COLORDIR.CFG for instructions.

version 2.4

- when there were 76 - 80 files in a sub-directory the scroll
didn't work quite right. Now it does. Thanks again to
Robert Fielder for pointing letting me know about this
problem.

version 2.31

- released only because some "buggy" copies of v2.3 were
distributed.

version 2.3

- the option to make filesizes the same color as the filename
now displays the entire line, including blanks, in that
color rather than just the characters
- the drive designation is displayed in all cases.
- removed the requirement to have DF, SM, SZ, SD in any
particular location or for that matter to have them at all
if you like the defaults I've set.
- another "bug" but it seems that BORLAND has fixed it. If you
put ";comment" into the .CFG file there were, shall we say
"unpredictable results". I can't find anything wrong with
the code and compiling the same code with version 1.5 of
TurboC (all others have used version 1.0) seems to fix the
problem. My thanks, however, go to W. K. Clarkson who
brought this problem to my attention.

version 2.2

- when using COLORDIR to obtain the default directory it now
displays what directory is being displayed -- thanks to
Robert Fielder for pointing out this problem.
- long volume labels were displayed with period after 8
characters --fixed.
- on long directories display "jumped" a bit when it scrolled
to make space for the returning DOS prompt --changed scroll
frame so that this did not occur.
- to maintain the same number of available lines for display
(prior to fix described above) COLORDIR begins display on the
first screen line rather than the second line.

version 2.1

- displays volume label as first directory entry.
- under some conditions the "No ColorDir.cfg found" msg
was not displayed correctly. -- fixed.
- incorrect default attribute for filenames.-- changed.

version 2.0

- added long display format (including file date & time)
option.
- cleaned up code a bit.

version 1.6

- padded filename with blanks, making display with solid
backgrounds look better.
- added SS attribute to COLORDIR.CFG. Determines whether the
file size is displayed with the same attribute as the
filename or the color defined by the SZ attribute

version 1.5

- eliminated display of "." and ".." subdirectory listings
- now lists number of files AND number of subdirectories
- reduced code size by over 1k
- reworked form of .CFG file.
- allow ";" to precede "comments" in .CFG file

version 1.41

- fixed a bug that resulted in the first line of files being lost
if the directory listing contained 77, 78, or 79 files.
Thanks to Rob Campbell (sysop - CMIX BBS, Toronto) for finding
this problem.
- fixed error in documentation which gave my Fido address as
157/201. It is really 167/201.

version 1.4

- added color configuration ability (via COLORDIR.CFG)
- eliminated "Total disk space" and replaced it with
"This listing contains" which displays the amount of space
used by the files listed.
- updated documentation including explanations of changes above,

version 1.3

- added scrolling capacity to allow up to 500 files to be
listed in from a directory.

versions 1.0, 1.1, 1.2 (beta-test versions)

- which means they didn't work well enough to be released but
were distributed to some of my friends for testing.