[Coco] dsave problem, or is it dircopy??

[Gene Heskett]

On Saturday 17 September 2005 22:40, Robert Gault wrote:
>Gene Heskett wrote:
>> Roy, anybody else with late nitros experience;
>>
>> I've found the WP_RS stuff ok, but somethings not right in that I'm
>> having one hell of a time trying to copy it to a floppy.
>>
>> Ever since the seagate drive was installed, dircopy has refused to
>> acknowledge any options, so while I can get the stuff to a floppy,
>> the file dates etc are not preserved.  Because there are many copies
>> of some of it,
>
>It? What is "it"?

All the files for the version of WpDrv I was using last Robert.  They
are, IMO, a considerable improvement over the original os9 drivers
from the late 80's.
>
>> the file dates I consider important because its the
>> only way I can, after 9 years, see which file of the many is the
>> newest.
>>
>> dsave I didn't like way back then, so it was never installed in the
>> cmds dir on my old drive.  I presume its in /dd/cmds, but the syntax
>> to run it has
>> been changed and for the life of me, I cannot remember the new syntax
>> it requires.  I've been playing 20 monkeys at the typewriter for the
>> last half an hour now.
>
>Many of the commands in the recent NitrOS-9 versions have had their
>built-in help messages removed and transfered into the sys/helpmsg file.
>This file is accessed using the OS-9 command Help. Help has built-in
>prompting but a typical usage follows:
>
>help dsave

All well and presumably nice, but its never worked since the old
maxtor & its SC-II was replaced with a new scsi controller from Mark,
and all my old data then copied from the wheezing Maxtor to
/dd/MAXTOR on a newer 1GB seagate.

>> Can someone toss me a bone here?  Tell me how to run the new dsave
&
>> maybe I can get this to work.
>
>You can get more detailed info as shown above but dsave now expects to
>be in the directory of interest and only a single path is used which
>points to where the copies should go.

Thats what I thought too.

>> Or better yet, tell me why dircopy
>> isn't working with its usual trsu option syntax.
>
>Presumably dircopy is an OS-9 utility?

From ComputerWare, a very handy utuility that when its working, mops
the floor with dsave.  And it worked just fine up to nitros9 version
1.22, although I ran mostly stuff from 1.16 because the later stuff
didn't support my seriel mouse, nor the wp-rs.  After about 1.22, my
maxtor was needing a bump to start it, so most of my work got moved
to an amiga 2000 with an 040 cpu, 64 megs of ram, a 30GB drive, and a
picasso-II video card.  That drive eventually went toes up & since I
was already playing with linux at about redhat-5.1, the rest is as
they say, history.

For programming ease, the coco/os9 was tops, the
amiga wasn't too bad, but moving to linux caused a lot of my
programming skills to go fallow because linux does not support the
constructs I got used to using on the amiga, where any process can
communicate freely with any other process thru named 'ports'.  You've
heard of the Rexx programming language?  ARexx on the amiga was
actually a huge superset of Rexx itself,  Rexx not having any of
the communication facilities ARexx has.
 
>It is quit likely that old third
>party utilities written for OS-9 may have problems with NitrOS-9 either
>because they can't run in 6309 native mode or because recent versions of
>NitrOS-9 have changed the OS-9 defs. Some of my own programs must be
>recompiled because of the defs changes.

defs changes?  I made lots of additions, but I don't recall actually
changing an already defined definition.  That would be considered
"poor form" IMO.  But then I'll be 71 in a couple of weeks & maybe
I'm getting behind like I am in replaceing rotted fence posts in our
split rail fence.  That was part of todays activities. :-)

-- 
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
99.35% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly
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Copyright 2005 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.