Managing Your Files:
- Organizing Information on Disks:
Information should be stored on disk in a logical manner to allow easy access to your files.
The Amiga Workbench organizes information into a hierarchical system of drawers.
A drawer, or a directory in AmigaDOS, is a container for items that are related. These items can be files and even other drawers.
On any disk you can create multiple drawers containing multiple files, as available disk space allows. Workbench also allows the creation of drawers within drawers, "subdrawers" or subdirectories, for further file management. Create as many drawers and "subdrawers" on your disk as needed.
A drawer icon is displayed in the disk window for each drawer created on a particular disk.
Each drawer window contains the icons of the files and subdrawers that exist in it.
- Paths:
A path is a complete description of the location of a particular file on a disk. When a program requests the name of a file for retrieval, specify the files path, including the volume or device name and all the drawers that lead to that file.
The method for specifying paths varies from program to program. Most programs use a file requester with a scrolling list, in which the disk name, any drawer names, and the file name are displayed.
Click on the appropriate names to specify the path. However, for some programs you may have to type in the complete path name.
To enter a complete path:
- Type the name of the disk followed by a colon. This name is the volume name of the disk, such as Mydisk:. You can substitute the disks device name, such as DF0:, in place of the disk name. However, if you enter the device name rather than the volume name, be sure the correct disk is in that device.
Diskname:
- For a file that is not in a drawer, specify the file name after the colon following the disk name.
Diskname: filename
- For a file in a drawer, after the colon following the disk name specify the drawer name followed by a slash (/) followed by the file name.
Diskname : drawername/ filename
- If there are more drawers in the path, each drawer must be specified followed by a slash.
Diskname drawername/subdrawername/filename
Note: File and drawer names containing spaces can cause recognition problems. It is recommended that you avoid using spaces in file or drawer names.
If you have trouble referencing a name that contains a space, enclose the entire path in double quotation marks.
- File and Drawer Names:
The following rules apply for naming files and drawers:
Names can be up to 31 characters long.
- Colons (:) and slashes (I) are not allowed within a name. These characters are reserved for path statements. However, other non-alphabetic characters may be used.
- The use of spaces before or after names should be avoided due to the possibility of confusion.
- Upper and lower case differences (capitalization) are preserved and displayed by the Amiga. However, the system is case-insensitive: upper and lower case are considered the same.
- Duplicate file names are not allowed within the same drawer. you save a file with the same name as an existing file in a drawer, it overwrites the original file in that drawer.
- Two files with the same name can exist in separate drawers or within different paths.
- Trashcan:
The Trashcan is a special drawer in each volume for storing files that you no longer need and may wish to delete.
Discard icons or pseudo-icons for the files to be deleted by dragging them into the Trashcan.
If the icon to be discarded is a drawer, its associated files are also moved to the Trashcan.
Choosing Empty Trash from the Icons menu deletes the icons and all of their associated files from the Trashcan.
Before choosing Empty Trash, you can still recover any of the Trashcan's contents by opening its window and dragging the icons back out.
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