The following organizations have my authorization to distribute TrashMan:
TelePrint Systems
NYMUG
CI/CUMUG
For authorization, please contact me at the address below.
NOTE:
TrashMan is NOT free. TrashMan is shareware. TrashMan will make your system 7 trashcan behave the way it ought to, and might save you hours of lost work. Isn’t that worth a few dollars?
If you use it, please send $10.00 to:
Dan Walkowski
212 E. Gregory #102
Champaign, IL 61820
(217) 384-0967
email: walkowsk@cs.uiuc.edu
(For site license information, please contact me.)
In addition, if you have some sort of Net access, (GEnie, InterNet, BitNet, CompuServe, AOL, etc.), please send along your address, so that I can get in touch with you if necessary.
Paying your registration fee will entitle you to use all possible future versions of TrashMan freely. (Not to mention that your feature requests will receive higher priority).
Additionally, if you include a floppy disk with your payment, you will either get the latest version (if you do not have it) or the next release, if you wish.
FIRST:
I would like to extend my thanks to the beta-testers of this new and improved version:
Akif Eyler, Bill Walker, David Hull, Keith Cummings, Jerry Wilcox, Pat McClaughry, Murph Sewall, Adam Engst, Alberto Ricci, Brian Gordon, A.K.Burton, David Davies-Payne, and John Brewer.
(I hope I'm not forgetting anyone...)
TrashMan is straightforward and easy to use because I made it that way. Although it looks simple, it is 2482 lines of code at last count. Please give me an incentive to keep writing useful software by registering your copy of TrashMan. Is $10 that much to ask?
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EXPERIENCED USERS:
SOME OF TRASHMAN'S FEATURES HAVE CHANGED. READ THIS DOCUMENT FOR DETAILS.
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NEWS
••• I have finally designed an interface/method for the 'burner' that I like (and I hope you will too. I am working on it currently, and will start including it with future versions of TM. At this stage, it looks like it can be part of the Emptier, without introducing any confusion. (Trust me :-) Look for it in version 4.1.
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WHAT IS TRASHMAN?
• TrashMan is a system enhancement designed for System 7 and beyond. (TrashMan will not work with System Software prior to 7.0)
• TrashMan consists of 3 pieces:
TrashMan Engine -- which runs as a faceless background application and does all the actual work. (About as close to a UNIX daemon as you can get on a mac)
TrashMan Emptier -- which provides a Finder drag/drop interface with the Engine.
TrashMan Controls -- a control panel which allows you to change the settings of both the Engine and the Emptier.
•TrashMan works like an electronic compost heap, deleting files from your trash after they have 'aged' beyond a setpoint that you specify, in days, hours, and minutes. (For example, I keep mine set at 1 day, so I always have exactly the last 24 hours worth of trash in my trashcan.) TrashMan works with all mounted volumes, including AppleShare. (Don't panic, AppleShare servers keep separate trash directories for each user).
•The TrashMan Emptier empties the trash of any volume that is dropped on it, acting like a selective 'Empty Trash' command. It does this by communicating with the Engine.
• If you use TrashMan, you need never choose ‘Empty Trash’ from the ‘Special’ menu ever again, and yet still receive the benefits of the new non-emptying trash in System 7.0.
HOW DO I USE TRASHMAN?
Place the TrashMan Emptier on your desktop. It is easiest if it is near your disk icons.
Place the TrashMan Controls in the Control Panels Folder.
Place the TrashMan Engine in the Extensions Folder.
(Note that this can be accomplished by simply dropping both of them onto your System Folder icon)
Open TrashMan Controls and set the preferences (This will create the prefs file). You will see the following:
••The top set of controls allow you to adjust the length of time files will be allowed to stay in the trash before being deleted.
••The middle controls allow you to start and stop the Engine, and adjust its speed. (Users of faster Macs can leave it at top speed with no detectable penalty. Others may want to turn it down a bit. Note that this setting is relative. If your Mac is idle, the Finder may give the Engine more time than it actually requests.)
••The bottom controls allow you to change the ejecting behavior of the Emptier. If the checkbox is checked, volumes that are dropped on the Emptier will be unmounted and ejected after their trash is emptied. This works with all volumes, except those that are shared. Note that the use of the option key when dropping a volume temporarily reverses the sense of this setting.
•••IMPORTANT NOTE FOR ANTI-INIT PEOPLE: Although the TrashMan Engine _appears_ to be an extension (an INIT) it is not, in the normal sense. It is a faceless background application, with a special type, so that the Finder treats it as an Extension. TrashMan does NOT patch any traps, or have any INIT code in it. It is simply a program like any other, and therefore has no chance of conflicting with other extensions.
WHY WOULD I WANT TO USE TRASHMAN?
The trash can on the desktop is a wonderful idea, except that I find myself doing something that I’m sure many of you do also: I drop something in the Trash, and then immediately go to the Special menu and choose ‘Empty Trash’. Why? Because I, like many of you, run at near capacity on my hard disks, and always want to have as much free space as possible.
The new trash can in System 7.0 is a much improved version of its ancestors, but introduces new problems. It is wonderful that the Trash no longer empties unexpectedly, but now if you don’t choose ‘Empty Trash’ periodically, it will accumulate many files, wasting valuable disk space. So what happens? I choose ‘Empty Trash’ more often! Although this isn’t bad, it negates the reason that the new non-emptying Trash was developed: so that when you throw something in accidentally, you can retrieve it later!
It seems to me that what is really needed is an automatically emptying Trash. However, if it just empties everything every time you run it, it is no more useful than ‘Empty Trash’. (Offerings from other people, which either empty it all on start-up, or, even more extremely, empty it every 10 seconds or so (!) don’t satisfy me.) What I think is really needed is a ‘Smart’ trash. One that doesn’t throw away everything in the trash, just the files that have been there a ‘long’ time. (And I want to be able to decide what ‘long’ means.) After over 23 years of painstaking research, I have developed TrashMan. (Well, OK, it wasn’t quite that long).
COMMON QUESTIONS ABOUT TRASHMAN
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WILL TRASHMAN SLOW DOWN MY COMPUTER?
TrashMan uses only a little RAM, and is configured to be an extremely, EXTREMELY low-priority process, because my intention is for TrashMan to have as little effect on the performance of your Mac as possible. However, the Engine has a speed setting so that users can adjust the cpu time used.
WILL TRASHMAN FIND THE TRASH IF I HAVE RENAMED IT TO SOMETHING ELSE?
(You mean like 'Slime Pit'?)
YES.
COULD TRASHMAN SOMEHOW DELETE FILES THAT ARE NOT IN THE TRASH?
ABSOLUTELY NOT.
MIGHT TRASHMAN DELETE SOMEONE ELSE'S FILES FROM A FILESERVER?
NO, running TrashMan on your local machine can never delete other people's files from a server. However, if TrashMan is running on the server itself, it then can delete any or all files in the trash on the server. (See below)
WHEN MIGHT TRASHMAN NOT WORK?
TrashMan never works on Sundays or Holidays. (Just kidding)
You MUST be running System 7 to use TrashMan.
Unusual external file systems might not work with TrashMan.
WOULD TRASHMAN WORK WELL ON A SERVER?
YES YES!! TrashMan would be ideal to use on a fileserver, because it would limit how long users could let files accumulate in their trash, wasting space on the server.
HOW DOES TRASHMAN WORK?
The TrashMan Engine incrementally scans the files in the trash continuously. When it finds a file it has never seen before, it 'time stamps' it by writing a code in the 'Get Info' comment field. When it finds a file that has been there longer than the maximum age allowed, it deletes it.
This means that you will lose any comments that you have attached to files when you throw them in the trash. This is probably insignificant, since we are all used to losing the darn things every time we rebuild the desktop anyway.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks again to my beta-testers, especially John Brewer, who assisted me on some late-night bug-stomping expeditions. And also thanks to Smittie, for being my contact to the pay-per-view nets.
DISCLAIMER
(Sorry about this, but I have to C.M.A.)
Although TrashMan has been tested heavily and no problems have been found, I do not have the resources (or the time) to test it under every conceivable condition. (For example, unusual external file systems.)
This means that you use TrashMan ‘as-is’, and at your own risk. I TAKE NO RESPONSIBILITY FOR ANY LOSS OF DATA THAT MIGHT OCCUR, and by using this software, you agree to these conditions.
Public Service Announcement:
TrashMan doesn't throw away your files. It recycles them.
DAW 92
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VERSION HISTORY
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Version 4.0.1
• Fixed obscure bug. A long integer was being clipped to a short by mistake. Unfortunately, this was an IMPORTANT long integer. (Maybe I should throw in a few unneeded variables in my programs, so that the chance of an important one being affected is smaller. hahahaha)
• Added some more error checking (you can never have enough of that...) and changed the text in some error dialogs to be more descriptive.
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Version 4.0.0
• Completely rewritten from scratch. New incremental scanning algorithm, which is undetectable in normal operation. No more pauses as TM scans your trash!
• Split into 3 parts, so as to minimize memory usage.
• Pretentious 3D animated 'About Box' and gratuitous sounds added to control panel.
• Controls are simpler. TrashMan is even _easier_ to use.
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(Previous version info deleted to save space. It is irrelevant now anyway, since the program works completely differently)
