CFOG's PIP, August 1987, Volume 5 No. 10, Whole No. 58, page 9
Newcopy: A Utility from Dave Rand
[This is the documentation from NC.LBR, a bit edited. Dave Rand explains the problem to which NC.COM is the solution. -- bhc]
I am one of the type who has a standard set of utilities, which I upgrade from time to time. I then distribute these upgrades onto my working disks. The problem:
1. Not all of the files on the source disk may be on the working disk. (E. g., source disk has C, Fortran and Basic, destination has only C.)
2. There may be files on the destination disk that you do not wish altered, so a bulk disk copy will not work.
Until now, SWEEP has been an unsatisfactory, but welcome, answer. NC has overcome the problem of updating disks. It will ONLY copy files that ALREADY EXIST on the destination (or, with a switch, files that do not already exist).
Now, when you get that new distribution disk for the fantastic QQz compiler, you can update your existing disks as follows:
NC B:*.COM A:
NC supports multiple wildcards, so you can also do this:
NC (B:*.COM B:*.QQZ B:Q*.Q*) A:
This will take all *.COM, *.QQZ and Q*.Q* files that exist on drive B, and copy them on top of the files that exist on drive A. Since the destination files are deleted before copying begins, you should not have to worry about running out of disk space.
NC also allows you to copy files that DO NOT already exist. This means you can merge disks as follows: NC /N B:*.* A:<cr> This will take all files from B that DO NOT already exist on A, and copy them to drive A.
With version 1.15 and up, multiple source drives may be specified, as follows:
NC /N (B:*.COM C:*.QQZ D:*.ARC D.*.DIR) A:
This means copy the selected files from drives B, C and D to drive A. [As you can see, while Dave's NSweep does a lot of things, there are some things that it doesn't do that NC does. -- bhc]