[Coco] 'head' and 'tail' for CoCo OS-9?

Joel Ewy jcewy at swbell.net
Sat Jan 2 17:43:36 EST 2010


Gene Heskett wrote:
> On Saturday 02 January 2010, Joel Ewy wrote:
>   
>> Surely somebody has made these useful utils...  I can't find them on any
>> of my old floppies, or on RTSI, Maltedmedia, or any other source of CoCo
>> goodies.
>>
>> Ideas?
>>
>> JCE
>>     
>
> If the file locking still works correctly in the newer versions of nitros9, 
> list makes a reasonable substitute.  It tmode pause is on, you have a head, 
> and if its off, and you've started an assembly that is making its listing, 
> then that listing can be read in very close to real time with list, which 
> will read the file till it runs into the currently locked by the assembler 
> sector, and will dutifully wait till that sector is written and unlocked, 
> reading it when it can gain access.
>
> There is a slight gap between the assemblers unlocking that sector and 
> locking the next as it writes, so there is an about 1 in a thousand chance 
> that list will read beyond the write, but you'll have to play with it, a lot, 
> to get exactly the timing glitch to effect a list.  Only with faster hard 
> drives was I ever able to trigger it, never when working on floppy's.
>   

I'm not sure that will quite do what I want, Gene.  I'm trying to shave 
a few hundred bytes off the end of binary files.  Maybe I can figure out 
how to make 'ded' do it for me.  I actually found a 'tail' program on 
one of my old CoCo disks, but it's 'head' I need.

JCE

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>
>
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