[Coco] toolshed beta release

[Tormod Volden]

On Sun, Mar 20, 2016 at 1:08 AM, Bill Pierce via Coco wrote:
> Tormod, yes, I'm talking about a command in decb in toolshed. And no, a regular file copy will NOT replace a backup command. Copy only copies files listed within the directory. The Coco has many disks which have "hidden" sectors not listed in the dir. A prime example being the OS9 boot track. Many RSDOS programs use track 34 as a "boot" track as well. I know the VIP library uses hidden sectors as do others. Some commercial programs used hidden sectors as copy protection. There are other files that have "un-type-able" filenames. These are basically files hidden in plain sight... you can see them, but can't get to them easily.
> A backup command would copy from sector 0 to the last sector regardless of what is on the disk. Also, backup will copy OS9 disks to an RSDOS formated disk image and especially to an hdbdos/rgbdos RSDOS disk partition. A backup would allow the user to copy the OS9 bootdisk to the hdbdos RSDOS partition (not possible with any "native" tools or the current toolshed tools... that I know of).
> All I want to know is how hard it would be to implement? Seems to me, it would be easier than "copy", which has to deal with directories, allocation tables and such. Backup just copies the whole disk sector by sector, regarless of contents.
> There have been many times I wanted to backup a bunch of disk images to hdbdos disk partitions, but ended up doing it from an emulator. Using copy will NOT get hidden files or boot tracks, at least not from the docs I've read.
>

The disk image file contains all "hidden" sectors of course, so if you
copy the disk image with a regular /host/ copy command it copies
everything. If you want to copy a disk image /into/ another disk
image, you can use "os9 copy".

If both a and b are disk images,
 os9 copy a b,
will copy the disk image a as-is into the root folder inside the image b.
 os9 dir b,
will then list the disk image copy as a file inside the image b.

Tormod