Tech Support Pits:

From Bonnie===
Dear Webby,
Is there any way in the world to print a copy of the list
of items in a given file folder, specifically, My Shared
Folder, which in my case is the list of songs on my hard
drive?  It would be so much easier to manage that file,
i.e., making CDs, if I had hard copy in my hands.
I can't find anything any way I try to accomplish this.
Thanks much!  Love the daily dose of wonderful humor!
Bonnie

Dear Bonnie
The easiest way to do that is to use the DOS command line.
No need to be scared. The command line simply puts YOU
in command, and lets you be just as bossy on the computer
as you are around the house.

To get to the command line, click START, RUN, and type
cmd

If your pictures are in c:\pix\04\summer,
then to Change to that Directory type at the command line:
cd c:\pix\04\summer
(Always a space between a command and a parameter)
As soon as you hit Enter, the command prompt will read:
c:\pix\04\summer>

Now, what you want is a DIRectory listing, but you are
ready to bet that there are many ways of doing that.
So you type dir /?
It will show you all the options.
Depending on what you want, choose that option.
If you for example want the files Ordered by Extension
(file type), then use
dir /O:E c:\pix\04\summer
bmp files will be first, zip files will be last.

OK, so far all this fancy action is still only on the screen,
but you want to > send it to a file and name that file
pixlist.txt.

For that you type
dir /O:E c:\pix\04\summer > pixlist.txt

Now you can open pixlist.txt with Quattro, Excel, Lotus,
any spreadsheet or word processor.
In that you can mess with it any way you want, paginate it,
write comments, etc.
And print it.

What I wrote here is just a tiny glimpse of what you can
do at the command line. You can do thousands of
different things, like copying to different directories,
drives, even different machines on a network, move,
rename, use wildcards, etc. And best of all, you can
list a whole BATch of commands in  a BAT file that
you can make a shortcut icon to.

For now though, play with
dir /O:E c:\pix\04\summer > pixlist.txt
and get comfortable with the command line.

More news from planet DOS tomorrow.

Have FUN!
DearWebby