Disc Director               disk management
Manage Duplicate Files with the Phantom Directory
 
Microbytes Daily News Service
Copyright (c) 1989, McGraw-Hill, Inc.
Athena last month joined the crowd of hard drive maintenance
utilities with Disc Director, a program that lets you visually
reorganize your directory structure, eliminate duplicate files,
and attach comments of up to 78 characters to programs and
directories. The program can also function as a menu system,
allowing you to launch programs from data or executable files
when you're in a Disc Director session.
 
Disc Director uses what Athena calls a phantom, or virtual,
directory to manage duplicate files. The program scans your
hard disk drive for all duplicate file names. The phantom
directory contains a list of pointers to each file. You can
manipulate the pointers as if they were actual files in a
directory, performing such standard file functions as COPY,
BROWSE, and ERASE. The REMOVE command deletes the file name
entry, but not the actual file.
 
With the program, you can search for a file in eight ways,
including by comment, text, attributes, and date. The program
displays information in bar graphs and directory trees. You can
rearrange directories by highlighting a ``branch'' on a tree
structure and dragging it to a different location.
 
Disc Director works on the IBM PC with 512K bytes of RAM. A
Novell LAN version is scheduled to ship January 10, 1990,
according to the company.
 
Price: $79; LAN version, $295.
 
Contact: Athena Software, 4915 Twin Lakes Road, Suite 19,
Boulder, CO 80301, (303) 666-9569.
 
                              --- David L. Andrews
 
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