 The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group Where Did I File It? Tom Coleman |
 |
Here is a quickie. I have mentioned this one before but I was asked to do it again.
You know what it is like when you cannot find a file. You know it is somewhere on your hard disk or maybe on one of twenty floppies. How do you find it? You can always use WHEREIS.COM or WHIZ.EXE which are great file finders. Both are in the public domain and in our Shareware/PD catalogue. WHEREIS searches all of the current drive. WHIZ searches all drives. Now what do you do if you do not have either of them handy. You might be using a different machine or you have lost your path to WHEREIS.COM.
You can use the DOS command ATTRIB.
What!, I can hear you say, ATTRIB is for charging file attributes. I know, but it is also used for displaying a file's attributes. If, from the root directory, you enter:
ATTRIB WH*.* /S
the ATTRIB command will start looking for all the files that start with WH (WH*.*) in the current directory (the root directory) and all subdirectorles of the current directory (/s).
If it finds a match it displays the full filespec and tosses in the flies attributes for good measure.
It works just as well as WHEREIS.COM but does not look in all drives like WHIZ.EXE. Its greatest virtue is that everyone has ATTRIB.COM, it comes with Dos.
Reprinted from the November 1992 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia
