Building the Perfect Workbench, Part Eight
Your Assignment, Should you choose to accept it
Handling Assigns
Assigns on the Amiga are a way of putting a friendly face on the business of accessing storage devices. Basically, an Assign is a shortcut, meant to make a long unwieldy pathname into a more easily remembered nickname. In other words, an assign can reduce "Work:Programs/Graphics/NovaDesign/Where/the/heck/am/i/oh/yeah/ImageFX3" to a simple "ImageFX:" From this example, we can deduce that 1) Assigns can be very useful, and 2) Apparently, writing this column has adversely affected my sanity.
If you take a look at your Startup-Sequence file, in the the S drawer of your sys: partition, you will find the original system assigns:
These assigns set up some important directories, but the main OS assigns are not explicitly listed here. SYS:, C:, S:, L:, LIBS:, and DEVS: are 'internal' assigns already in place before the assigns listed in the Startup-Sequence execute. Note the funny looking >NIL: thing in all the assign statements. The '>' is the redirection operator. This is used to tell a command where to send it's output. NIL: is yet another system assign. This is the Amiga's version of 'Talk to the hand'. Any text, error messages etc., the command might want to print are sent off to oblivion. Normally you only use this in scripts, when you don't want output to disrupt the script.
Figure 1: MultiCX Assign Wedge Requester
So, Assigns are pretty darn handy, but unfortunately, they aren't perfect. One problem is sometimes you're in the middle of a program, saving your data, when you realize you forgot to make a needed assign. Or a program can't load a file because you moved a directory. Then you get a 'Please insert volume so and so'. Not very helpful. While most times you can open a shell and type in the Assign, it isn't very convenient. Enter a utility known as an assign wedge. This is a system utility that presents you with a more usable requester. You can click on the Assign button, browse to the desired directory. You can also use the mount button to mount a device, like a Zip or CD drive. Some AssignWedges have a Deny button, which basically tells the system that a volume is not available, is never going to be available, and quit crying about it. Use this button with caution. AssignWedge, by Olaf Barthel, is one such program, and Martin Berndt's MultiCX also includes this function. See Figure 1 for the AssignWedge included with MultiCX. These programs are available at Aminet:
After you've used you're Amiga for awhile, you'll find you have collected quite a pile of Assigns, usually found in your User-Startup file. This can get pretty messy, but as usual, the Amiga programmers have provided some helpful solutions.
Peter Palm's Assign Master is a simple yet powerful program for managing those pesky assigns. Assign Master shows your assigns in a GUI, where you can add new assigns, edit the present ones, or delete them, all with the click of the mouse. See Figure 2 for Assign Master.
Laurent Faillie's LFSystemBinder allows you to manage Assign, Path, environmental variables and Residents (resident programs hang around in RAM, thus are faster than loading and running from the drive.) LFSystemBinder has a nice GUI, and lets you easily add, remove and edit system assigns, as well as Path, environmental variables and residents. There is also a interactive mode for on-the-fly assigning. See Figure 3 for LFSystemBinder.
Figure 3: LFSystem Binder
Spring Cleaning
Finally, one last must have program is Frank Fenn's SweepSys. This program scans your hard drive, and reports on system files (libraries, Devices, Fonts) in use. It not only lists the files, it tells you what program is using a particular file. This is quite handy in order to keep your system from filling up with deadwood, old libraries, fonts etc., that you no longer need. See Figure 4 for SweepSys.
