Utilities

This page is devoted to utility programs developed by Gammon Software Solutions over the years. We hope you find them useful.

TreeInfo

Does your disk fill up every six months (no matter how big it is), and then you have to work out which files you need to delete? Do you wonder where those 100 Mb monster files are? Are they in "Program Files", "Games", "Temp", or some other obscure spot?

Unfortunately, Windows does not provide an easy way of working out which folder takes up the most room - you have to click on each one individually in the Explorer, get its properties (to see its total size) and then move onto the next one. If you have hundreds of folders this process is quite tedious.

To address this issue I wrote TREEINFO - a program that "walks" the directory tree (from a nominated starting folder) and summarises the amount of disk taken by all sub-folders from that starting folder.

Although the program traverses all folders to get an accurate folder size summary, it only displays the sizes of the folders one-level down from the starting folder, so that you can easily analyse which folders are taking the most space.

You can then repeat the process if desired from a lower-level folder.

Written for Windows 95 or Windows NT.

SecureDelete

Program to walk the directory tree (from a nominated starting point) and securely delete every file it finds, and remove directories.

The purpose of this is to remove files and/or directories in a way that they cannot be later recovered by someone armed with a delete-recovery or disk editing program.

You might, for example, use it to delete files when:

• The files are highly confidential
• Your PC is being given to someone else (eg. at work, or by selling it)
• You don't want other people using software you bought
• The files contain commercially sensitive data (eg. source code)

Written for Windows 95 or Windows NT.

DeleteUnused

This program is intended to be used in conjunction with "SecureDelete" to securely remove any data that might be left behind on your disk in its "unused" sectors (ie. sectors that are not used by existing files).</p>

This is to guard against the possibility that someone with a disk editor might view your unused sectors and recover the contents of files that were previously there.

It does this by opening a file whose name you choose (the name isn't important), and then writes to it continuously until the disk fills up. It then writes another six passes of data (first pass, all one bits, other passes random data), to make sure the data can't be recovered. It then deletes this file, to free up the disk space again.

Written for Windows 95 or Windows NT.

PortInfo

This program is for MUD administrators who need to temporarily (or permanently) display a message to anyone connecting on a particular port on their PC. The message might be "MUD down" or "MUD relocated". It can monitor any number of ports, and each port can display the same or a different message. Messages are stored in ordinary text files.

Written for Windows 95 or Windows NT.

PortTester

This program is for MUD administrators who need to be able to check whether their MUD is up (in a batch file) and, if not, start it up again automatically.

Written for Windows 95 or Windows NT.

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