HELP PURGE                                      Steven Hardy, March 1982
                                                 Aaron Sloman, July 1982
                                    Revised John Williams, November 1992

The VED command <ENTER> PURGE can be used to "purge" your files, i.e.
selectively delete old or unwanted files. First, type

    <ENTER> purge

This uses the Unix utility "ls" to produce a new temporary VED file
listing all the files in the current directory, one per line, something
like this:

    -rw-rw-rw- 1 joe     6542 Dec 23 08:48 fee
    -rw-rw-r-- 1 joe    25558 Dec 23 12:28 fie
    -rw-rw-rw- 1 joe    13866 Dec 21 14:52 foe

Put an asterisk IN FRONT OF each file you no longer want, i.e. mark the
files to be deleted with an asterisk at the BEGINNING of the line. So if
you want to delete "fee" and "foe", your directory listing should look
like:

    *-rw-rw-rw- 1 joe     6542 Dec 23 08:48 fee
    -rw-rw-r-- 1 joe    25558 Dec 23 12:28 fie
    *-rw-rw-rw- 1 joe    13866 Dec 21 14:52 foe

Then type:

    <ENTER> del

This will convert all the lines with asterisks to SHELL 'rm' commands,
and remove the other lines from the file. So your file will now look
like:

    rm fee
    rm foe

If you are sure you have marked the right files, then type

    <ENTER> shell

and the 'rm' commands will be obeyed.


Purging after "DISK QUOTA EXCEEDED" errors
------------------------------------------

The <ENTER> PURGE command does not create any temporary disk files, and
is therefore safe to use after receiving a "DISK QUOTA EXCEEDED" error.

Also, note that if a "DISK QUOTA EXCEEDED" error occurs while writing a
file, VED does not leave half-written copies of the file lying around,
which means that you will probably want to keep the "top" copy of that
file.


Purging selected files
----------------------

The <ENTER> PURGE command will accept any of the formats which the 'ls'
command will accept, which means that you can use "wild cards" in
filename specifications. For example, if you are interested only in
looking at old versions of files produced by VED (whose names will end
in '-'), you can do

    ENTER purge *-

and then mark the unwanted files with '*' as before, followed by <ENTER>
DEL and <ENTER> SHELL, as described above.


Related Files
-------------

HELP * SHELL            General introduction to Unix for Poplog users
TEACH * FILES           General introduction to the notion of "files"

HELP * LS               Documentation for LIB * VED_LS
LIB * VED_LS            VED interface to the Unix 'ls' command


--- C.unix/help/purge
--- Copyright University of Sussex 1992. All rights reserved. ----------