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             ©   1 9 9 4   S t r a y l i g h t
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                       About CurrDir

For some reason, people appear to like to have the current
directory in their command prompts.  Indeed, I wrote a code
variable to do this last November.  Following a discussion
on c.s.a recently, I decided to upgrade my program for
doing this, and then, out of the kindness of my heart, give
it away.  Nutty, isn't it?

So what makes Straylight currDir better than the other
current-directory-in-a-code-variable utilities around? 
Well, for a start, it was written by Straylight.  For
seconds:

* It does it the `right way' by using OS_FSControl 37
  (CanonicalisePath) on the string `@' which avoids
  problems with the mangling-system-variables approach,
  which can go badly wrong.

* It allows you to specify the variable name, so you can
  have lots of different variables with different options,
  if you want.

* It allows you to specify a `maximum length', beyond which
  the path name is truncated, so that the path string
  doesn't fill up the whole width of the screen.

The truncation is fairly sensible.  It will attempt to show
you the filing system and disk name, if there is one, and
will chop off the beginning, rather than the end, of the
actual pathname, so

  scsi::Wintermute.$.Straylight.Software.Freeware.Dynamite

might be shortened to

  scsi::Wintermute.$...tware.Free.Dynamite

As you have no doubt noticed, an ellipsis (`...') is
inserted to show that characters have been removed.
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                       Using currDir

At simplest, just double-click on the `currDir'
application.  This will create a system variable called
`CSD' which contains your full current directory path.  You
could then put in your prompt with a command like

  SetMacro CLI$Prompt [<CSD>]

If you want to create a different variable, use the `-var'
option, e.g.:

  currDir -var My$Variable

If you want to specify a maximum length, use the `-maxLen'
option, e.g.

  currDir -maxLen 40

will ensure that the name never exceeds 40 characters.

You can't remove these variables in the normal way --
*Unset will silently ignore your attempts.  Therefore
currDir has a `-remove' option which you can use, in
conjunction with `-var' if necessary, to kill a variable if
you don't want it any more.

If you're stuck, typing

  currDir -help

will provide you with some addmittedly fairly terse
assitance.
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                     Technical details

currDir is written as an application since it can
safely quit once it has set up the actual code variable. 
Making it a Utility was a possibility, but that can have
the nasty side-effect of fragmenting the module area.  It's
unlikely you'll want to use it from anything other than the
command line, so it shouldn't be that much of a problem. 
The program needs a little over 2K to run, so as long as
you have a page of memory free you won't have any problems
there.

currDir was written in an evening, using the Acorn ARM
Assembler, which is jolly good, and I recommend it.
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