uuUndo/uuUndo 1_0 ƒ/uuUndo notes

uuUndo
a fast, free batch uudecoding utility

written by Aaron Giles (giles@med.cornell.edu)
version 1.0, 7 November 1994


Overview

This is the first official release of uuUndo, a fast, free batch uudecoding utility for the Macintosh.  Although uuUndo was originally designed to work with John Norstad<61>s NewsWatcher, it does quite nicely in its own right as a standalone drag and drop smart uudecoder.

uuUndo is shipped as a fat binary, running incredibly quickly on PowerPC machines, and makes full use of asynchronous I/O to ensure smooth operation in the background.  Because it is based on Leonard Rosenthal<61>s DropShell code, uuUndo is also fully scriptable and recordable.  uuUndo requires System 7.

If you find any bugs or have any comments, please email me at giles@med.cornell.edu.  Thank you.


About uuencoding

uuUndo works with uuencoded files.  uuencoding is a common format on non-Macintosh systems which accomplishes the same thing that BinHex does on the Macintosh; that is, it is designed to allow a binary data file to be stored as text and thus included in mail and news messages.  Unlike the BinHex format, however, there is no integrity checking built into uuencoding, so there is absolutely no guarantee that a file has been decoded properly.  Be careful!


Design Limitations

uuUndo was designed from the start to accept uuencoded text files <20> possibly interspersed with header lines and other miscellaneous junk <20> and translate them into their original binary format.  As such, it assumes that the file contains ALL of the original uuencoded data stored in the proper order.

What this means is that you cannot save several parts of a uuencoded file to three separate files and expect uuUndo to know what to do with them.  It also means that you cannot save a bunch of unordered parts to the same file and expect to get the proper result.  You must save all parts of a uuencoded file to the same file and in order.  If you are using NewsWatcher, this is done for you automatically. 


Operation

uuUndo<64>s general operation should be pretty straightforward: you can either drag and drop uuencoded files onto the uuUndo icon in the Finder, or you can manually open up the uuUndo application, choose uuDecode File... from the File menu, and choose which file you wish to decode.

(Quick tip:  If you are using NewsWatcher to decode a number of binaries, you might want to consider launching uuUndo first, before extracting.  This prevents uuUndo from quitting and relaunching between files, and makes overall operation much smoother.)


Duplicate Files

If the file which is created through the uudecoding process already exists, a new name is algorithmically generated by adding a <20>.0<EFBFBD> to the end of the file name.  In the event of a further conflict, the last character incremented until a unique name is found.


Preferences for Extension Mapping

Unlike BinHex files, uuencoded files do not contain all the information needed to determine what type of file they are, or which application should be used to open them.  In order to get around this, uuUndo comes with some flexible extension mapping capabilities; this means that uuUndo will examine the last part of the file's name (the <20>extension<6F>), and from that guess which icon to give the new file.  For example, filenames ending in <20>.GIF<49> get automatically mapped to JPEGView<65>s GIF icon.

Although uuUndo contains an internal list of which extensions should get mapped to which icons, it is often useful to be able to add your own extension types or to change which icon a given file extension will map to.  To do this in uuUndo, you will need to open up uuUndo<64>s Preferences screen.  Do this by choosing Preferences... from the File menu. 

What you get when you do this is a window dominated by a list box on the left hand side.  This list contains all the extensions uuUndo currently knows about, along with the creator and type codes, and the icon associated with that extension.  You can scroll through this list, select items (one at a time only), and generally do what you<6F>re used to doing with lists of