Commodore 1541-II - Printing a Directory; Reading a Directory as a File; Another Way to be Selective

PRINTING A DIRECTORY
To make a permanent copy of a directory, perhaps to fasten to the diskette's outer
(paper) envelope, you will need to send the directory to a printer, such as Commodore's
MPS 801, 1520 and 1526 serial bus models. To do this, you may need to refer to your
printer manual, but briefly the procedure for listing a directory to device 4 is as follows:
LOAD44$0",8
OPEN 4,4:CMD 4:LIST
PRINT#4:CLOSE 4
Also note that all of the statements that can be combined on one line already have
been. Type them in immediate mode to avoid disturbing the directory.
All other options, such as differing device numbers, and selective directories (see
next section) can also be specified as usual in the Load command.
WARNING: Be sure to include the PRINT# command after every printer
listing. Otherwise, the printer will remain as an unwanted listener on the serial bus,
and may disrupt other work. Also, do not abbreviate PRINT# as ?#. Although it
will look proper when listed out, it will cause a SYNTAX ERROR in use. The
proper abbreviation for PRINT# is pR.
READING A DIRECTORY AS A FILE
If you would like to read a directory from within a program, you may do so. In Basic
3.5, simply include the DIRECTORY command in your Basic program. In Basic 2,
however, and optionally in the others, you will have to Open the directory as though it
were"a data file and read it character by character. See the discussion of Get# in Chapter 5
for more information.
ANOTHER WAY TO BE SELECTIVE
Before discussing the pattern-matching options available for use in several disk
commands, let's cover one more that is only usable in a directory. Several different types
of files can coexist peacefully on^the same diskette. By altering our directory load
command, we can create a directory from the files of a single selected type. Thus, we
might request a list of all sequential data files (see Chapter 5), one of all the relative data
files (see Chapter 6), or one of only program files. To do this, simply add to the end of
your selective directory request the equals sign (=) followed by the first letter of the file
type you want in your directory. For example, the Basic 2 command:
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