RE: Reading long filenames

["Chuck Creesy" creesy@xxxxxxxx]

Robert writes:

> all I get is
> > the first five characters followed by a squiggle
>
> You mean a tilde? I think that's the name -- at least that's
> what that call it in Princeton.
****
But tilde sounds so staid; in contrast, squiggle--the term favored by
website developers--is so deliciously onomatopoeic. It's hard to resist.


> > and an exclam. Is there a way to
> > print the entire ten characters into the file?
>
> ... None of the XyWrite
> word processors can do it. You can only do it with
> programming.

> ... What is your specific need -- to get hold of the full
> filename, for use in the selfsame document? What do you want
> to be able to do ....
****
I had a few hundred html-encoded book chapters to send to Amazon and
BN.com; these had ten-character ISBNs for filenames. But the vendors
insisted on having a tag with the ISBN *inside* each file as well. When
VA$fi failed, I did a DIR at the command line to get a filelist and then
manupilated it to make a BAT file that would produce copies with just
the final six characters as filenames (the first four characters, in
this case, were always 0691 and hence could be temporarily dispensed
with). Then VA$fi worked to do the insert with a hard-coded 0691 prefix.
I was hoping there might be an easier way.

Since you mention it, I've been interested in the idea of using NotaBene
as a launchpad for XPL routines, hoping it would get around XyWrite's
unhappiness with Windows (which I'm forced to work in because of the
other applications I have to use, though I spend a fair amount of time
in Linux for our Apache webserver, and I'm using Perl more and more for
tasks that I once gave to XyWrite). But you make it sound as though NB
might not serve as well as I was hoping. Can anyone point me to a source
offering guidance about running XPL on NB? The Dragonfly website seems
curiously silent on this feature, as though user programming were not
desired.

--Chuck Creesy,
Princeton University Press
Princeton University Press