Hello all!


Alright, another one for the batch gurus in here.

FIrst, some background.  My braille embosser uses heavy
fanfold tractor feed paper.  This come in boxes of 1000
sheets each.  Because they must be ordered from elsewhere
and shipped turnaround time is about 3 weeks from the time I send the folks
a bank draft or other financial instrument
until paper arrives on my doorstep.

So, to alert me when I ought to start thinking about
ordering more most batches that I write which will generate
hardcopy braille use the statistics file of the braille
translator program to give me the total number of sheets
I"ve used from a box of paper, in most cases counting the
waste sheet which must be accounted for due to the tractor
feed mechanism.

But, every now and then I do braille output from dos itself, and I have a
nice little batch which lets me enter the
number of pages used when capturing a screen or other dos
output.

My batches use the braille translator's statistics file, an
all pages master file, and of course HOrst's nset, and in
some cases listmod along with TImo from FInland's command
line calculator to derive a new value of allpages.txt
whenever anything happens that generates hardcopy.
We also want to storee the statistics file for the braille
translator in a master file which gets recreated whenever a
new box of paper arrives.

So, now for the question.  The batch I use to increment my
page counts of course accepts a command line parameter which is the number
of pages used but where the braille translator was not used.

Is there any way that you gurus know of to limit the scope
of acceptable parameters such as is provided in dbase?  I.e. the command
line parm given must be numeric or the program
branches to a block of code that generates an appropriate
message then ends?

Just curious.



Regards,
           Richard
--- timEd 1.10.y2k+