May 98 - Tips
Volume Number: 14
Issue Number: 5
Column Tag: Tips & Tidbits
May 98 - Tips & Tidbits
by Steve Sisak
Reducing CodeWarrior Disk Usage
Codewarrior is a product of many thousands of tiny files.
On a 2GB disk, each individual file will take up a minimum of 62k (even if it only
contains a few bytes) because of the way HFS breaks up a disk. (HFS+ solves this
problem, but until then...)
You could reformat your hard drive and create a smaller partition just for
Codewarrior, but there is an easier way: Use Disk Copy 6.1.3 to make a 200 MB
read/write disk image of an empty folder. (Actual size will need to be varied depending
on what features you are installing.)
Mount the image to the desktop, install Codewarrior to the virtual volume, and then
put the resulting image (or an alias to it) in your startup items folder. Because you
are working with a smaller 'virtual volume' your block size will be reduced to around
6k per file, saving you tonnes of disk space.
Colin Foster,
cfoster@pobox.com
______________________________
Wrapper for ParamText
Many people don't seem to realize that you can't pass nil arguments to ParamText.
Here's a wrapper routine that lets you forget about this inconvenience, as well as
about having to convert between Pascal- and C-string formats:
void ParamCText
(
char *Param0,
char *Param1,
char *Param2,
char *Param3
)
static Str255 Param[4];
#define CopyArg(n)
if (Param##n != nil)
strncpy((char *) Param[n], Param##n, 255);
Param[n][255] = 0;
c2pstr((char *) Param[n]);
}
else
Param[n][0] = 0;
} /*if*/
CopyArg(0)
CopyArg(1)
CopyArg(2)
CopyArg(3)
ParamText(Param[0], Param[1], Param[2], Param[3]);
} /*ParamCText*/
Just a couple of notes about the code:
1. The local "Param" is declared static to minimize stack usage. But feel free
to change this if you don't like it.
2. The strings are copied using strncpy, instead of strcpy. This way, if you
pass a string longer than 255 bytes, it will be truncated, rather than
inadvertently writing over random memory. strcpy should probably be banned
-- did you know that something like 90% of of the Unix security bugs that
people keep finding on the Internet are caused by buffer overruns?
Lawrence D'Oliveiro,
ldo@geek-central.gen.nz
______________________________
TCL SetItem Gotcha
Because of an obscure gotcha in the MenuManager routine SetItem, TCL users
implementing 'Other Size..." support must beware. The traditional approach reserves
one item on the size menu to dynamically display the 'other' size, but this item has no
logical initial value, so the temptation is to leave it empty. In a TCL application one
uses "#-1" as the text, and the #-1 is stripped by the CBartender before it calls
SetItem to install the text, which in that case would be void, with dire 'unpredictable'
results. Instead you can use a blank as a placeholder, ie " #-1".
Dana S Emery,
demery@ieaccess.net