[Coco] file manager

[Andrew]

Brett,

Have you taken a look at any of the existing CoCo "filemanagers" (that I 
know exist, but I don't have links or anything)? There were tons written 
in the 80's in BASIC, mainly; designed to run after issuing the DOS 
command (hooking into the same area as the OS9 boot), or for running as 
RUN "*.BAS" or something similar. Most were designed to be as small as 
possible (fitting into 1 granual), and had basic commands for copying a 
file, loading it, running it, deleting it, etc.

Given that RSDOS doesn't have directories (unless someone somewhere 
implemented some extended system - maybe you did? I don't know 
everything about your system), you couldn't have a "true" file manager 
to copy data/apps between directories, do directory comparison, etc 
(unlike OS9 - I'm sure there are tools there to do something like that?).

If you wanted to expand on the "single directory" file manager theme for 
RSDOS, then maybe things to add might be Base64 encode/decode? Simple 
image viewing for popular CoCo formats? Print of directory? Maybe a 
"meta-info" file (hidden or not) that had some info about the filesystem 
(disk?) being looked at? Text/Basic file view/edit (hmm - maybe a 
general purpose full screen editor for any ASCII file - with Base64 
encode/decode, coupled with a hex editor for binaries?).

Of course, all of that would bloat the thing up to way more than 1 
granual; but in today's world with IDE drives, controllers, DriveWire, 
etc and such, that is no issue at all - I think...

:)

-- Andrew L. Ayers, Glendale, Arizona