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From: longe@statsci.com (Michael Longe')
Newsgroups: comp.os.ms-windows.programmer.tools
Subject: Replacement for DSKLAYT2 avail
Keywords: MS Setup, DSKLAYT2
Message-ID: <longe.739489620@grouper>
Date: 7 Jun 93 21:47:00 GMT
Article-I.D.: grouper.longe.739489620
Sender: usenet@statsci.com (Usenet News Account)
Organization: Statistical Sciences, Inc
Lines: 32

Fed up with the bugs in Microsoft's Setup utilities, I wrote a replacement
for DSKLAYT2.EXE in Perl. (The DOS version of the Perl interpreter is 
available from various sites.)

DSKLAYT2.EXE is replaced by two scripts, DSKLAYT2.PER and DSKLAYT3.PER.
The former checks the sources and splits and/or compresses the files as
needed; the latter copies the (compressed) files to the destination image
dirs or disks.

Not all of the DSKLAYT/DSKLAYT2 features are supported, mainly because they
aren't documented and I didn't need them. I also don't claim to be a Perl
expert. Everyone's encouraged to improve upon what I started.

In addition to fixing bugs (especially the loss of relative dir paths), I 
included some features that were useful to me:
    - specification of temp file and split file dirs
    - flag to accept split files as-is without resplitting/compressing them
    - prepending a sort key code to the Section or Ref Key field, to help
      keep related files on the same disks
    - quiet mode which turns off all non-error output
    - destination of either dir or floppy drive
    - generation of a .BAT file containing copy-to-dest commands


E-mail me if you want a copy (warning: I'll be on vacation for most of June). 
If it should be uploaded to an FTP site (now or after public revisions), 
perhaps a kind soul would do that for me.


Michael Longe'
Designer Software
(longe@statsci.com at client's site)