Hi! Richard,

I'm sorry Richard, I've been a lazy jerk with this project.  The thing
works (though it needs a little more work), and I've just been doing
occasional tests over the last couple of weeks.  Initially I tried picking
random nodes to search but I just ended-up searching for fellers I knew;
for the last lot of tests that I did, I tried using the nodes listed in the
last echomail in each echo I read.  That seemed a little better and more
'honest'.

I tried to use a program 'execution timer' but Windows kept on barfing on
the cscripted executable I was trying to use for it, so I used the
old-fashioned 'Mark 1' timer: one one-thousand, two one-thousand, etc.  :) 
The last timed test found the 2nd last node in Zone 2 on a count of 16. 
Far better than my original estimate.

Once I saw that I had a working version I seemed to not have the time to
boot into Windows, so I had a brief excursion into attempting to use DOS
emulators in linux.  Bad idea, which wasted a few more days and nothing
worked the way I wanted.  Anyhow...

I've got to add a few more bits into a final version, like the 'replace'
call to filter out the "" symbols from
the nodelist, and some code to tell it when it's found a RC entry (at the
moment it finds it and just goes straight on to check for a NC entry), and,
also some cleanup (variables/files) calls.

On 31 Oct 07 13:08, you wrote to me:

 PQ>> I'd be interested to hear from any other NSET user if they can
 PQ>> replicate that error... or not. :-)
 RW> I think I might have that around here.

Cool.  Here's a checklist for the utils you'll need:

  IFNUMBER.EXE - a free batch util by Frank Dethlefsen. (*IFNUMBER.ZIP)
  NSET.COM ----- util by Horst Schaeffer. (*HORST32.ZIP (NSET 2.1, I think))
  LMOD.COM ----- yet another util by Horst Schaeffer. (*LMOD13.ZIP)
  PSIS.COM ----- a free batch util by Greg Miskelly. (*PSIS-600.ZIP
                 (I'm using 5.00))
  * Available from a BFDS site near you.

You'll also need a copy of "Replace.Com" by Gene Garapic, back in
'88.  I still have a copy of the cscripted post by Bat Lang from back in
'97 which I use, so, I could simply post it here again.  (Mind you, there
are a number of generic search & replace utils in the BFDS but I
haven't checked them out.)

Which leads me to a question: should the replace operation be done every
time you want to do a search, or would it be better to run the replace
'search & destroy' just once for each new nodelist, and, keep using
that cleaned-out nodelist?  What do you reckon?

Ermmm... and, what version of Windows/DOS do you run (again)?

Cheers,
Paul.

... Trees moving back and forth are what make the wind blow.
--- GoldED+/LNX 1.1.5-31012