Sorts Win95 long filenames on disk. Shareware; registration
information below.
Version 1.7
Copyright © 1995, 2004 D.J.
Murdoch
- Description
- New in this release
- Downloading
- Licensing
- Online Ordering
The original Norton Utilities had a program called DS which could sort your
DOS directories according to your preferences. Later versions added a graphical
interface so you could manually move files around.
When Win95 came out with the VFAT long filenames, DS stopped working. It
hadn't been written to handle the new directory records. Symantec (the current
owners of the Norton Utilities) haven't produced a new version of DS as far as I
know, so when Jacques Bensimon suggested that a minor modification to my long
filename backup utility DOSLFNBK could do directory
sorts, I decided that I wanted DS badly enough to write it myself. There was
already at least one freeware/shareware utility called DIRSORT, so I called mine
LFNSORT.
LFNSORT does both more and less than the original DS. It can sort on more
characteristics:
- full filename
- extension
- last modification date
- last modification time
- creation date/time
- last access date/time
- size
It can also sort according to a pre-specified order that is saved in a file.
What's more, it can be run in DOS or a DOS box in Windows, and will not mess up
the long filenames in either case.
The current release doesn't have a graphical sort for manual positioning,
but that is currently in the works.
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The main improvement in Version 1.5 of LFNSORT is the addition of FAT32
support. It also fixes some serious but fairly rare bugs in 1.4, and makes a
small change to the syntax of the parameters. Here are the details:
- FAT32 support
- The current release of Win95 (OSR2) supports partitions on hard disks
larger than 512 Megabytes. It does this by making fairly substantial changes to
the internals of the disk storage, including changing the File Allocation table
from 12 or 16 bit entries to 32 bit entries. LFNSORT now supports FAT32.
- However, I would like to add a warning. Microsoft has provided truly
terrible developer support for FAT32, effectively making it impossible to obtain
a copy for testing for less than the cost of a new computer, and I don't
personally have a copy. They even seem to treat the documentation of FAT32 as
some sort of secret. All of the testing of FAT32 in LFNSORT has been done
externally by volunteers, and this delayed the release by at least 6 months.
- The FAT32 code in LFNSORT has been released now for more than a month in
DOSLFNBK, so I am reasonably confident that the bugs
are out. However, if you use FAT32, you should watch out for bugs caused by
other utilities; I expect a lot of them are rather poorly tested there.
- Change to Syntax
- DS and older releases of LFNSORT require the sort order to be specified as
the first parameter and the directory as the second. Version 1.5 allows the
order to be reversed. You need to include a "." or a "\" in
the directory if you give it first to signal that it's not a sort order.
- Bug fixes
- The following bugs in version 1.4 have been fixed in version 1.5:
- Some special characters were displayed improperly.
- If you sorted the directory where your Windows swap file was located, the
swap file directory entry could be corrupted.
- If you had very large directories (more than 2000 short filenames, or some
smaller number of long filenames) a few entries would not be written properly.
This could result in corruption of your disk.
- When errors occurred, the reported error was usually uninformative and
sometimes wrong. Errors are now reported correctly and more informatively now.
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LFNSORT version 1.7 is available by clicking here.
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LFNSORT is *not* public domain software. You may use it at no
charge for an evaluation period of 30 days only.
You are free to distribute unmodified copies of the complete LFNSORT
package, provided your total charge is no more than $1. The total cost of a
compilation (e.g. a CD ROM) including LFNSORT must be no more than $1 per
package in the compilation.
To continue to use LFNSORT beyond the 30 day evaluation period, you must
register it. There is currently only one registration level available:
- $10 simple registration
- This registration fee gives you a license to use one copy of LFNSORT
indefinitely. If you include an email address when you register I will notify
you of new versions and how to obtain them yourself. I'll also attempt to answer
emailed questions about LFNSORT from registered users.
DISCONTINUED $20 bonus disk registration
DISCONTINUED $45 source code registration
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Last updated October 2004.