Drive Icon Query.

What Steve said, +1.

You can share stuff like that under Windows, and if you go to eject a device that others may be connected to, it will prompt you accordingly. If you just pull it out, or say “yeah, trash other people’s data”, then it’s on your head.

Anyway, regardless whether of not one understands the technicalities of it all, they’re still a twat if they remove a device somebody else is still using.

Can RISC OS not do such a thing as prompt the person “dismounting” the device if there are active shares on it?

Can RISC OS not do such a thing as prompt the person “dismounting” the device if there are active shares on it?

Only if RISC OS has prior warning. Dismounting by pulling the plug gives no OS any chance.

As for what you probably meant, i.e. the “Dismount” menu option: I guess you’d have to look for whether another client has any open files on the device, as that’s the only criterion of “active” that matters – otherwise any client that’s connected, regardless of any exchange of data, would count as active.

You can’t share ‘removable’ drives from the iconbar menu since you might remove them whilst someone else on the network is accessing them.

Perhaps more fitting to make Eject (assuming ‘Dismount’ becomes ‘Eject’ for removeables) throw open a confirmation dialog for shared drives.

And if you just yank it out, open a warning window.

Sharing is exactly what I have wanted to do with removeables in the past, though with slightly less ubiquitous media than USB.

The *Share command still works though,

Anyone wanting to share directories without resorting to the command line or obey files might want to have look at DirShare

DirShare makes it easy to see which directories are currently shared. It also allows you to create and remove shares, and set/alter the access permissions.

It’s still in its early stages and can only be run for short periods of time ¹ but hopefully for long enough to get an impression of what it does.

¹ The toolbox scrolllist gadget leaks memory when deleting items. The longer you run DirShare the more memory is leaked and the longer DirShare takes to quit. I’ll need to find a way to reduce/eliminate this.

The toolbox scrolllist gadget leaks memory when deleting items.

Toolbox as in built into RO5.2x or Toolbox as in ROL?

Nice util, shame the functionality isn’t present in the OS don’t you think?

Toolbox as in built into RO5.2x or Toolbox as in ROL?

The RISC OS 5.2x toolbox, alas. The ROL version has a number of memory leaks in the scrolllist gadget fixed, although I haven’t tested if this particular one has been fixed too.

The non-availability of the latest ROL toolbox modules on RISC OS 5 is a constant annoyance here. A lot of good has been on them, both in terms of features and stability.

Nice util, shame the functionality isn’t present in the OS don’t you think?

Thanks, and yes it would be nice to have this functionality out of the box. On the other hand, it did give me an opportunity to write something new. :-)

DirShare has been updated to v0.03. The scrolllist now only updates when there’s a change which reduces the amount of memory leaks greatly.

Sharing an entire drive has been made easier by allowing the DirShare icon to be dragged straight to the drive’s icon on the iconbar.

I’ve also found a limitation, directories on removable media cannot be shared protected. Trying to access such a share results in a ‘Not found’ error.