Locating the right DISK Drive

[SMARTII]

This is general, but since V9 is my current, It's posted here.
A file (ascii) will be written to 1 drive, but it's up to A5 to find which one it is.

It can be A: B: E: F: or G: depending on the client's current hardware which may change at any time.
Only one of those drives will have either a Floppy disk in it (A) or a USB Flash drive ready.
I have to locate the drive and if it has writable media.
Then write the File to it.
I don't want to cause a lot of crashes or media errors for the user, just find it and send/write the file to it.
It would be nice, if a USB, to write to it, and then "release" it so Windows does not need to be consulted on "safely remove..."
Any ideas on the most efficient way?.
Also, I have to remove any misc. existing files from the media before writing to it.

Thank you.

[Stan Mathews]

Re: Locating the right DISK Drive

file.drives_get()

And parse the result.

? file.drives_get(",")
= "C:\,D:\,E:\"

? strtran(strtran_multi(file.drives_get(","),comma_to_crlf(":\,C,D"),""),",","")
= "E"

You can use filefind.get() with the appropriate flags to get a list of all files. You can parse that list and feed it to file.remove().

[SMARTII]

Re: Locating the right DISK Drive

Thank you Stan..Great as usual!
I need to get use to all the built-in functions in A5 that I had to hand write all these years in my old Platform.
So, I will assume the function exists and do a better search.
I got the Functions Handbook today, too.
Tom

[MikeC]

Re: Locating the right DISK Drive

Tom,
You can also determine most drive types with file.drive_type(). As "Removable" applies to both Floppy and USB Flash drives, they can be differentiated by checking for whether drive is A: or B: and branching from there. Along with this you can also determine if there is media in the drive and whether it has enough space available with the file.drive_space_avail() which can help with error trapping. I use this in one of my backup routines and works well.