Cat

This is a disc cataloguing utility for RISC OS.

It presents the catalogue of a disc or a chosen directory showing not just the contents of a single directory but a tree-like graphical display of all directories and sub-directories. It also allows the files and directories captured from the disc to be stored and saved for 'off-line' examination or future reference. To generate the graphical display it requires the application !MakeDraw to exist on the user's computer.

Opening the archive Cat.zip that you download and then dragging a file from it onto the icon bar icon of !Cat gives this display. SparkFS will thus be running (so that zip files will be recognised as an image filing system). StrongHelp is not running otherwise the contents of the manual 'ReadMe' would be visible. The sizes of files are available (and are thus shown) as they have been freshly downloaded. Saved and re-loaded archives will show only the sizes of directories.

One useful thing it can do is to show the changes in a particular directory from a previously-saved copy of what was in that directory. When generating a 'DiscCat' archive, a CRC value for the contents of a file (actually just the first 4Mbytes of the file) can optionally be stored. Differences will therefore be recognised by the datestamp and or the actual contents. This is done by SHIFT-dragging an earlier record of the contents on top of the display window.

This display distinguishes between files added, those with new content and those where the content is the same but the datestamp has changed.

The initial, default dsiplay shows files and directories arranged in descending order of the size they occupy on disc. This allows the few, very large files on the disc to be found very quickly wherever they are on the disc.

This display shows that there are several large directories. The top level directory 'Amag_30' has been expanded by a mouse click. The impression documents would be shown with the correct icon if the filer had seen the directory in which they reside when the graphic (note not the 'DiscCat' file) had been saved.

Suppose you know you have saved a file somewhere on the disc and you half remember the filename.

This finds all files on the chosen part of the disc where the filename contains the given sub-string 'ba'.

You can add descriptive text to a display and move the branches of the tree around by manually editing a DiscCat file.

This graphic is created by manually editing a DiscCat file.