Assign Management Utility

[Daedalus]

A few years ago I started writing a small utility for managing assigns, but never finished it. I finally got around to getting it to a more or less finished state and have released it into the wild. I don't know if it's something many other people would find useful; I use it occasionally, but if anyone else might find it useful, it's available on my website and very shortly on Aminet. It's 68k/OS3 code using MUI, but works fine on OS4 and MorphOS too, and most likely on AROS 68k too though it's untested.

Screenshot here to give you an idea of what it does

[ptyerman]

Cool stuff. I will find this handy.

[daxb]

What is the meaning of "Permanent", "Active" and "Enabled"?

[Daedalus]

Permanent means it's part of the Startup-sequence, User-startup or Kickstart (ENV:, DEVS:, L: etc.), and so is present every boot. If it's not permanent, it may have been added manually (e.g. using Assign in a Shell yourself), by another script that the program doesn't scan (e.g. the SDK setup script), or dynamically by some software (e.g. AmiBlitz 3).

Active means it's actually present in the DOS assigns list in memory, so is available for access by software. If it's not active, it won't show up in file requesters or with the Assign Shell command. This can be toggled by double-clicking it.

Enabled means it's in either the Startup-Sequence or User-Startup and is not commented out. If you comment out an assign in the User-Startup for example, it will show up as disabled. You can toggle this state too by double-clicking on the entry.

[tolkien]

Hey! Looks useful. Will try thanks!

[TenLeftFingers]

Nice one Daedalus, thanks!

[Sir_Lucas]

Great job @Daedalus, as always!!

[AMIGASYSTEM]

Tested it works well on Aros 68k and AFA OS !
You can add tab dismount volumes? (Assign Dimount)

For systems that do not have the MUI installed MyAssigns works anyway just copy NList.mcc the only library in the required path.

[Daedalus]

Originally Posted by AMIGASYSTEM

Tested it works well on Aros 68k and AFA OS !

Good to know, thanks for the report!

You can add tab dismount volumes? (Assign Dimount)

If you try to do a remove and that doesn't work, it then does a dismount. I've done it that way since a dismount can cause problems for any software using the assign.

For systems that do not have the MUI installed MyAssigns works anyway just copy NList.mcc the only library in the required path.

Hmmm, NList.mcc is the only 3rd party library you need outside MUI, but it definitely needs MUI itself AROS has Zune built in which works instead, and AFA OS mush have an MUI setup installed too by default...

[AMIGASYSTEM]

Originally Posted by Daedalus

Good to know, thanks for the report!

If you try to do a remove and that doesn't work, it then does a dismount. I've done it that way since a dismount can cause problems for any software using the assign.

I was not referring to those volumes, example:

Mount CD0: (when I need it)
Assign Dismount CD0: (when I want to remove)

Hmmm, NList.mcc is the only 3rd party library you need outside MUI, but it definitely needs MUI itself AROS has Zune built in which works instead, and AFA OS mush have an MUI setup installed too by default...

But you do not need to install all MUI

Test Just Workbench Floppy done (There are all MUI features but works):

- Floppy Workbench 3.1
- Floppy Fonts
- Muimaster.library
- Libs NList

[Cylon]

Well, MUImaster.library is the toolkit engine. So: Yes, it requires MUI.

[AMIGASYSTEM]

Originally Posted by Cylon

Well, MUImaster.library is the toolkit engine. So: Yes, it requires MUI.

It is normal this is useful for those who do not want to install MUI, but they want to use or test a MUI program

[Daedalus]

Originally Posted by AMIGASYSTEM

I was not referring to those volumes, example:

Mount CD0: (when I need it)
Assign Dismount CD0: (when I want to remove)

Ah, I see. Well, they're not assigns (and the assigns listed by MyAssigns are not volumes), so it's a little beyond the scope of what I was looking to write.

[daxb]

I launched it on my A1200 3.1 and noticed some parsing? errors in target string. I.e. comments ";" are included and ">" for APIPE assign. Further a Prepend assign (RAM: dismount from S-S) with target ";".

[Daedalus]

Originally Posted by daxb

I launched it on my A1200 3.1 and noticed some parsing? errors in target string. I.e. comments ";" are included and ">" for APIPE assign. Further a Prepend assign (RAM: dismount from S-S) with target ";".

Hmmm, could you post or PM me your startup-sequence, or the lines where it's not parsing correctly? Admittedly the parsing is far from foolproof, but it manages to catch everything I have on my various setups. I'll be able to improve it if I get any problem lines to look at. Thanks

[daxb]

Send you a PM with the information. Here the screenshots how it looks:

[Daedalus]

Just reading your message now, they're quite interesting scripts you have there Far more complicated than my own which is why it's having so much trouble interpreting them. I'll use them as examples / test cases and will hopefully have more robust parsing in an updated version soon.

Thanks for the feedback!

[daxb]

Does the code tag work in PM? It only looks complicated because of the amount of comments and difference to original S-S and U-S. Hey, 20 years of changing/optimize. If you remove all the comments and deactivated stuff it becomes really short (S-S = 38 lines, U-S = 8 lines without the version stuff). Complicated might be the fact that assigns are placed in S-S, U-S and MCP.

When I read that myassign scans S-S and U-S my first thought was how do you parse all the different possibilities (you might cannot know) that can appear because there isn`t a defined structure to follow. I don`t know but maybe the S-S/U-S that come with different OS install packets like amikit, classicwb, ... are worth to parse?

[Daedalus]

Yep, the tags worked fine, it's just quite the setup - as you say, 20 years of adjustment will do that. I've plenty of extra stuff in my scripts too, but for whatever reason they all worked fine.

The parsing routine is relatively simple - it checks each line for an Assign command. When it finds it, it checks if it's commented or not, and then looks at and stores each argument in turn so it can reconstruct them again later with changed parameters. In this way it shouldn't really matter what the structure of the script is, however I have a feeling the extra comments might be confusing it - I don't know how it reacts to having the word "assign" twice in a line for example, which I think may be why you have some assigns show up as a ; instead. Dismount also seems to be incorrectly spotted when it's commented out... But I'll have a look properly later on when I have the code in front of me. I'm particularly puzzled by the "prepend" tag, no idea how it managed to find that!

[LuigiThirty]

This looks cool, I love seeing new utilities for OS3. I'll give it a try with my A2000!