MS-DOS question

[John Burke]

I'm always glad to see new iterations of this cache deleting process come
around.  The question I have for all of you is:  does sticking one of these
lines in your autoexec.bat make this deleting process take forever?

A little background:  I have implemented this before on our workstations,
all of which run Win95, and are split between 200MHz (3) and 75MHz (5)
Pentiums.  Each time I have done this, I have had complaints (nice ones)
from staff about the time this process takes.  I have the Netscape cache
set at 5MB, and other than when I've just cleared the cache manually,
rebooting with the delete line in place takes no less than ten minutes.
What's up with this?  Any thoughts?  It's not a horrible hardship, but as
you all know, a minute in front of a non-operational computer feels like an
hour to many folks.  Thanks! 

John

John J. Burke, MSLS  |  Systems/Public Services Librarian
University of Cincinnati - Raymond Walters College Library
E-mail: john.burke at uc.edu  |  I Corinthians 1:25
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At 06:57 AM 4/20/98 -0700, Jim Jones wrote:
>That is correct.  The "/Y" switch also works with deltree.  I think this
is what
>the user was actually doing at their other institution.
>
>If you deltree netscape's cache it is recreated every time netscape starts a 
>session.  it is part of its "self-healing" strategy which includes recreating
>the following files if they too are missing:
>
>The "cache" directory (whatever it is set to).
>
>bookmark.htm (recreated as empty).
>
>cert5.db
>
>cookies.txt (recreated as empty).
>
>key.db
>
>netscape.hst (recreated as empty).
>
>
>
>You could get the results you want by using either of the following commands:
>
>deltree "c:\program files\netscape\navigator\cache" /Y
>
>(the quotation marks allow you to use long file names and directory paths)
>
>and then leave it up to nescape to recreate the directory or you could use:
>
>deltree "c:\program files\netscape\navigator\cache" /Y
>md "c:\program files\netscape\navigator\cache"
>
>which allows you to take matters into your own hands.
>
>Another little known snippet is that you can set your netscape.hst file to
be 
>read only which will not allow it to fill up with the ongoing browsing
history
>of your users.  A nice byproduct is that calling about:global in netscape
will
>only display a message the the history file is closed.
>
>
>
>> Chris Gray
>> Library Systems
>> University of Waterloo
>> 
>> > We run resident Windows95 on an NT network.  I want to delete
>> > all items in the cache every time the system is rebooted.  I have edited
>> > the autoexec.bat file to include
>> >
>> > del c:\progra~1\netscape\naviga~1\cache\*.*
>> >
>> > I did this a long time ago at another institution and it worked well.
>> > Following the *.* I included a switch such as (I can't remember exactly)
>> >  |y
>> > /y
>> > \y
>> >
>> > Now I can't get this to work!  (At the other place we were
>> > running 16 bit software).  Does anyone know the switch that
>> > will tell DOS 'Yes' to delete all files in the cache rather
>> > than prompting for each file?
>> 
>>
>
>I hope some of this helps.
>
>Jim Jones
>
>System Coordinator/LAN Specialist
>Ball State University Libraries
>Ball State University
>Muncie, IN 47306
>
>Its nice to know that knowing DOS still comes in handy.  Batch programming
is  
>the glue that binds library systems together. 
>