HOW I AM DOING ALL THIS

Back in 1986, when I had started to run my textfile BBS, adding new textfiles was a relatively painless process. I just added new entries to the descriptions file, uploaded the textfile, and ran a little utility that came with PC-BOARD. Everything was handled for me; I didn't have to worry or care about the process involved. All that I had to do was make sure the same textfile didn't show up several times across the directories.

Of course, times have changed; with my taking on the work of textfiles.com, I decided that maybe it was time for me to do some work at writing shell scripts (and later perl scripts) to do the work, and do it right. This project is ongoing, but already the general framework is in place.

Much like the rings in J.R.R. Tolkein's books, I have a small toolbox of scripts that do a lot of the work for me. Here are what they are named and what they do:

These won't be the end of it, of course. There are at least two scripts I haven't written yet that will become more important as time goes on. The first one will go through a directory and change the extensions on files and match the descriptions to the new name from the old. This will get rid of these foolish ".doc" and ".txt" filenames that don't describe anything. The second one will go through the ENTIRE site and pick out suspicious doubled files for me, files that are a little too close to each other not to be considered duplicates. This will be somewhat heuristic, and I will spend some time making it work really well. Then we really WILL have the thousands we claim to have, and not have a bunch of doubles like we do now.

And so the work continues....