Re: finding files

["Robert H. Kubie" rhkubie@xxxxxxxx]

That utility you wrote sounds remarkably like one I
bought, mail order, many years ago called Free Filer, published by Telion
Software, P. O. Box 1464, La Mirada, CA 90637-1464.   It worked
very well in XyWrite for DOS but fell apart  in XyWin. 

I did some digging and found it had been written by  one Alan W.
Gomes, then a seminarian, 1-310-903-6000.  He very kindly sent me a
disk with a fresh copy of it when I inadvertently corrupted mine, but he
had no interest in further refining it.  He is now a professor of
theology at Biola University (1-310-944-0351 Ext 5542, Biola University
irada, CA 90637-1464).  I attach all this useless information (I am
sure he would not want to be called, and have no idea whether any of
these ten or fifteen year old telephone number will reach him) because I
am so  pleasantly dumbfounded that I was able to locate and
resurrect it all from my hard drive, after all these years. 

The program would search a whole directory of XyWrite files (or probably
any other ASCII files) for a paragraph containing a specified string,
pull that paragraph and copy it into a new file, retaining beside each
extracted paragraph, the name of the file from which it had come. 
As I keep a daily diary in XyWrite, naming each day's file with the day's
date, and as I begin each paragraph with a "now" command (that
inserts the time) and a three letter tab I have assigned to each matter I
am working on, the program made a very simple, workable way to create a
chronological file of everything I had done on any particular case. 
A simple, workable billing program.  

I lost Free Filer, but now Orbit can be set up to do the same
thing. 

Your utility sounds so much like my old Free Filer program that it piques
my interest. 

Forgive me for bending your ear about it.

--Bob Kubie 







That At 09:37 AM 11/11/99 -0500, you wrote:

> Years ago I wrote a XYIII+ utility that let
> you:
> 1. Select files from any Directory list.
> 2. Search for any string.
> 3. List files containing the string. (You could then re-select from among
> them, if memory serves)
> 4. Gather paragraphs containing the string and place those paragraphs,
> along with their filenames, into a separate file.
>
> For Xy4, I did the same thing, except only for the file currently
> displayed (so item 2 was irrelevant). It also allows certain Boolean
> operations and negative searches. It's in the shipping version of Xy4's
> DLG file.
>
> My guess is that NB does a lot better job with Orbis (though I've never
> used it), since my stuff was all home-grown (3+) or "official"
> Xyquest (Xy4) XPL code.
>
> Tim Baehr