File cleaners

[Xeon]

Hi there! What must I learn and what books must I read to create those file cleaning programs that deletes away unwanted files and freesup disk space? Thanks a lot! :-)

Who wans to be a zillionarie?
The last question, valued at US$1 Zillion dollars!!!

Question : What is God's greatest gift to us real men and boys?

a) Girls, females, women and ladies
b) Air
c) Water
d) Boys, men and males

(in this case, choose your answer wisely cos' the one who set the question is Xeon, not anyone else)

[Manish Malik]

Windows Documentation at Microsoft.com -- that will tell you which files are temporarily created and you can delete to free space. Rest is your language expertise.


Manish
http://www.manishmalik.com

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[Xeon]

This seems easy! Is that how those shareware/commercial file cleaners do? :-)

Who wans to be a zillionarie?
The last question, valued at US$1 Zillion dollars!!!

Question : What is God's greatest gift to us real men and boys?

a) Girls, females, women and ladies
b) Air
c) Water
d) Boys, men and males

(in this case, choose your answer wisely cos' the one who set the question is Xeon, not anyone else)

[Xeon]

Also, Manish! I can't seem to find any of what u said! I mean, there doesn't seem to be any place in MSDN that tells you which files are temporary files!!! :-O

Who wans to be a zillionarie?
The last question, valued at US$1 Zillion dollars!!!

Question : What is God's greatest gift to us real men and boys?

a) Girls, females, women and ladies
b) Air
c) Water
d) Boys, men and males

(in this case, choose your answer wisely cos' the one who set the question is Xeon, not anyone else)

[Manish Malik]

First places are some obvious ones:

1. The TEMP directory (for Windows 95/98,etc., the environment variable TEMP defines this directory)

2. The TMP directory (pointed to by this variable)

3. Browser Temporary files

4. Product specific files ( like..read here.. http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;q211632 )

5. Finally, search the disk for files with known extensions/filenames (e.g. vintage editors were known to save backup files as beginning with a ~ or ending with extensions .BAK or .BK or .TMP )

Hope you get the idea. :-)


Manish
http://www.manishmalik.com

Discuss it all at the Developer Forum : http://www.codeguru.com/cgi-bin/bbs/wt/wwwthreads.pl?action=list&Board=devforum ...

[Xeon]

Hi there Manish! Sounds cool! :-)
Does that means that it's real safe to delete all the .tmp and .bak files found on the system? Thanks a lot! :-)

Who wans to be a zillionarie?
The last question, valued at US$1 Zillion dollars!!!

Question : What is God's greatest gift to us real men and boys?

a) Girls, females, women and ladies
b) Air
c) Water
d) Boys, men and males

(in this case, choose your answer wisely cos' the one who set the question is Xeon, not anyone else)

[Manish Malik]

no. :-)

Because they might be storing some important info that should not be deleted. Also, it is not a 100% guarantee that any file with .TMP extension is a temporary file or is not of use anymore.

This is where your program manages the scenario, as you will see in popular programs...most cleaning programs usually bring up a list of potentially deletable files for you, and then you decide whether or not to delete them and free space. Leave the final decision upto the user himself.



Manish
http://www.manishmalik.com

Discuss it all at the Developer Forum : http://www.codeguru.com/cgi-bin/bbs/wt/wwwthreads.pl?action=list&Board=devforum ...