shorten for DOS/Windows
-----------------------

shorten has been built for DOS/Windows using the Cygwin toolkit, available at
<http://sources.redhat.com/cygwin/>.


------------
Installation
------------

To install shorten, first extract the files contained in the distribution .zip
file to a temporary directory, and copy shorten.exe and cygwin1.dll to a
directory that is in your PATH.  To find out what directories are in your PATH,
go to the DOS prompt and type:

  C:\> echo %PATH%

Any of the listed directories will do, but perhaps the best choice is one of the
Windows directories, e.g. C:\Windows, C:\Windows\Command, C:\Windows\System,
C:\WinNT, C:\WinNT\System32, et cetera.  Of course, yours may be different than
these, and there may be more than one Windows directory listed.

To make sure shorten working correctly, go to the DOS prompt and type:

  C:\> shorten -h

You should see shorten's version information (verify that it shows the correct
version - if not, then you probably have an outdated copy of shorten.exe
somewhere on your hard drive that you need to remove).  If you don't see the
version information, or if you get a message saying that the command was not
found, then shorten is not installed correctly.


------
Quirks
------

Due to the way Cygwin works, there are certain times when file names need to be
specified in a way different from the normal DOS syntax.  Essentially, the
differences are that (a) you use forward slashes instead of backslashes, and (b)
if you want to access files on a different drive than the one you are currently
on, you use can either use "d:", or if that doesn't work, "/cygdrive/d", where "d"
is the drive you want to access.


Case 1
======

If you are shortening files in the current directory, you can simply issue a
command similar to this:

  C:\> shorten track01.wav


Case 2
======

Now suppose your .wav's are in a different directory than the current directory
you are in, but they are on the same drive (drive C: for instance).  Then you
can specify where they are in one of two ways.

1. Example using a relative path to get to them:

  C:\> shorten ../disc2/track01.wav 

2. Example using an absolute path to get to them:

  C:\> shorten c:/other/directory/track01.wav

  or:

  C:\> shorten /cygdrive/c/other/directory/track01.wav


Case 3
======


Finally, suppose the .shn's you want to extract are on a completely different
drive.  Then you need to specify the drive letter, as well as the path to the
files, similar to the following:

  C:\> shorten -x d:/directory/on/this/drive/track01.shn

  or:

  C:\> shorten -x /cygdrive/d/directory/on/this/drive/track01.shn


You can easily avoid having to remember to do any of this, however, if you
always change to the desired directory before running shorten.  Taking the
example from Case 3, this is how you would go about doing this:

  C:\> d:
  D:\> cd directory\on\this\drive
  D:\directory\on\this\drive> shorten -x track01.shn

Note that you use forward slashes as a pathname separator *only* when invoking
shorten, not when you are issuing normal DOS commands.
