• MTAFile Updates

    From Black Panther@316:36/17 to All on Sat Nov 14 23:04:52 2020
    Hi All,

    For those of you who were not aware, I had written a program that would take the .TIC files from incoming files to the BBS, and create a New File Announcement that can be posted in automated message echos.

    I had stopped working on this program over a year ago, and started on some other projects. I had put this program out there as open source, to see if anyone wanted to continue with the development. I had one person who made some changes for personal use.

    Well, a couple weeks ago, I was taking a look at the source code, and decided to see if I could improve this program a bit. I've ended up doing some major rewrites of sections of it, which in turn increased the speed dramatically! On my test system, I was processing 500 tic files, and it would take about 3 minutes. That includes reading all the tic files, sorting all of the information by file area, then by filename, and removing duplicates. After the most recent changes, it will now process 500 tic files in about 16 seconds.

    While working on optimizing this code, I've also added some features that I felt would be useful for people when using this program.

    Here is a list of what's been done recently to this program:

    v4.0 - Started rewriting sections of code
    - so far, have removed over 250 lines of code. Still working on many optimizations, and rewrites.
    - Removed many global variables, and assigned them local
    - Added logging of exit errorlevels
    - Will supply list in code to show user the exit status of program - Rewrote many functions/procedures to optimize. Running 500 tic files at once went from 3 minutes to 15 seconds to process, so it's getting better
    - Fixed bug where LDESC would only print the last line
    - Fully incorporated use of OSID
    - Incorporated Line Terminator and Path Separators per OS
    - Rewrote LDESC section of printing report, due to problems with multiple null lines contained in some descriptions
    - Added option for how file sizes are displayed. Either full size in bytes, or shortened version in appropriate size, ie MB, KB, etc
    - Added option for thousand separator character.
    - Added option for date format between three choices

    I'll be running this locally on Castle Rock for a bit to make sure there are no problems with anything. After that, I'm looking at releasing this update.


    ---

    Black Panther(RCS)
    aka Dan Richter
    Castle Rock BBS
    telnet://bbs.castlerockbbs.com
    http://www.castlerockbbs.com
    http://github.com/DRPanther
    The sparrows are flying again...

    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A47 2020/11/06 (Linux/64)
    * Origin: Castle Rock BBS - bbs.castlerockbbs.com (316:36/17)