Introduction to Controlled Copy

Overview

Controlled Copy (henceforth referred to as CCopy) is a command line driven general purpose file copier/mover for DOS, Windows 95 and OS/2 text modes. While extremely versatile and powerful, CCopy is also fast to use.

CCopy is not just another copier, but it has been carefully developed over several years, paying attention to user friendliness, intelligent command interpretation, security and speed. An additional consideration has been compatibility with older programs. For this reason the command line options have been made to match normal copy programs, archiving programs and other widely used programs. If you know how to use the normal copy-command, you can use CCopy.

CCopy is extremely fast, and under right circumstances copies files almost twice as fast as other copiers. You can check out the copier speed comparisons for speed tests.

CCopy is a combined file copier and mover. This means that with the "/M" parameter, CCopy renames the files if possible, or first copies them and then deletes them. So, in fact, CCopy is two utilities in one.

Advantages over other programs

The most striking difference from other copiers is CCopy's ability to verify that enough free space exists to complete the requested copy. This makes copying much easier as you no longer have to first check that you have enough space as CCopy does that for you, taking into account different cluster sizes and directories.

There are some other copiers that will check for free space before copying each file. This is good, as there won't be any unnecessary copying done. But they won't tell you if all of the files will fit on the destination disk. CCopy does that and saves you the time it takes to always check that you have enough free space before copying the files you want.

Another thing that is immediately apparent are CCopy's extensive progress indicators. You see how much of the file has been read, written and compared, how much of the total file batch is completed (in bytes and files) and an estimate of how much longer the copying is still going to take.

CCopy also contains numerous options that aren't found in most other copiers and a few that are exclusive found in CCopy. The development history below will mention a few of these.

History and development

CCopy began in December, 1993. By then I was tired of always having to check that disks had enough free space when I had to copy some files to them. The most irritating scenario was copying a 1.44 megabyte file to a 3.5" diskette. After waiting for some two or three minutes you'd get that "Insufficient disk space"-message and have to start all over again. Not very practical.

I first tried to build a 4DOS batch file that would check for free space, but I quickly found out that it just wouldn't be enough. And so CCopy was born.

CCopy was originally based on two specific functions that were apparently very useful, but weren't implemented in any readily available programs:

1. Free space checking
2. Progress indicators

There were some programs that were able to check for free space before copying each file, but that wasn't enough for me. But in order to check for free space before copying any files, CCopy apparently had to first scan through all the source files and I was a bit worried about how slow that would be.

There was no need to worry, as it turned out to be a fairly fast routine. Even if it takes a bit of time, it will be gained back if a read caching program is in use and you can only even detect it if you're copying a huge amount of files or from a diskette.

So, after several months of hard work, the first release version of CCopy was completed. By then it had several other features in addition to the two founding principles:

3. Significantly faster than most other copiers
4. Compatible with normal copy and 4DOS copy with almost all their respective features

And then CCopy has just been developing, growing, refining and improving for some two years now. Even with all these changes, CCopy has remained true to its founding principles. The newest version 1.07 has many completely original functions as well:

5. Extremely easy and flexible user interface (still in command line)
6. Includes all features found in copy, 4DOS copy, Xcopy and other copiers
7. Acts as a file mover whenever possible, thus replacing the move-command as well
8. Identical versions for DOS and OS/2 (DOS-version is Windows 95 compatible)
9. Powerful file filters (update, changes, existing, archive)
10. Exclude file masks to copy all but certain files
11. Configurable screen output
12. Easy directory manipulation with automated creation and removal of subdirectories as needed
13. Optional file optimization to disks to minimize free space left on each disk
14. Optional zapping of destination directories clean prior to copying
15. Reads arguments from command line, environment variable and/or file
16+ Splits files, gathers files from subdirectories, moves directory trees, compares files, renames files on the fly, etc, etc, etc...

CCopy recognizes over 30 different command line options that allow it to do just about anything. Copying files has never been this easy - you can copy or move whole multi-directory programs from one location to another with a single command, leaving no leftover empty directories.

You can also take several megabytes of files and copy them to a floppy disk. CCopy naturally warns you that there isn't enough free space, but should you continue, you will be prompted for another disk when the free space is used up. Combine this with /O (Optimize) and CCopy will fill each disk as efficiently as possible.

CCopy has been available to users worldwide for some two years now, and only positive feedback concerning the program has been sent back to me. And note that I consider bug reports to be positive, as they naturally help me to refine CCopy to work as flawlessly as possible.

If you'd like to test CCopy yourself, download a copy now. You can also get more information from the main CCopy page.

Tarmo Toikkanen <[email protected]>

Last updated: July 29 1997