Cooking For Fun
MasterCook Help
Buster Lesson IVTips and Tricks: I thought I should add a few words about the .DON and .OUT files here using myfile.txt as an example.When Buster busts your recipe, it saves three copies of it, myfile.mxp, myfile.don, and myfile.out. Myfile.DON is actually still the myfile.txt file. If you really screwed up and need to look at the recipe and correct it, this is the file to look at.
Open it with your text editor, or word processor, make the necessary changes, then save as myfile.TXT. Then bust that file again. Myfile.mxp is the file you will importinto an MC cookbook. Myfile.out which is all the stuff Buster edited out of your recipe.
When you're finished busting, importing and checking your recipes, go to Windows Explorer and delete the .OUT and .DON files. It's best to do this soon afterwards or you're really going to confuse yourself the next time you bust.
A hint about importing. I have a cookbook called Busted where I store newly busted recipes. Here I check them and make sure all is well before moving them to different cookbooks.
Now to the fun stuff!! I haven't been using Buster all that long, but along the way I've picked up some stuff that makes the job easier. None of this is necessary, but if you feel brave, give it a try. You're probably wondering why the heck I told you to make a subdirectory called MC, right? Here's where that comes in. When Buster is all done doing his thing, I run a batch file that automatically deletes the .OUT and .DON files, moves the recipes into the MC folder and collates them, that is, it gathers all the individual files into one BIG file. When it's time to import, I look for the collate.mxp file (which will be in the MC subdirectory) and import just that ONE file! Pretty nifty, huh?
Since everything I import goes into my Busted cookbook, this makes it a snap to import a lot of files at one time. All of the .mxp files are in that directory too, so if there are files I know for certain go to a specific cookbook, I can still importindividual files. Clear as mud, right?
To write a batch file, open your text editor or word processor and select FILE|NEW. Type in the following, substituting C for the drive letter if you keep your Buster stuff on drive C. Don't type in the stuff I have in brackets. del<space>d:\buster\*.don
del<space>d:\buster\*.out move<space>d:\buster\*.mxp<space>d:\buster\mc
cd\buster\mc copy<space>*.mxp<space>collate.mxp Go up to FILE|SAVE AS, name
your batch file (mine is buster.bat) using the.bat extension and save it to where you're most likely to remember where it is. Mine is in the Buster directory. Run this file (in Windows Explorer it looks like a little window with a gear in it) when you're done busting, but MAKE SURE you won't be needing your .DON files!! This is DOS and whatever is deleted goes into a big black hole. LOL I'm not sure if it's true. Does anyone know where stuff goes when it's deleted from DOS? I use BigBin which makes deleted DOS stuff show up in the Win95 Recycle Bin. If anyone's interested in that, I'll see if I can remember where I downloaded it from.By now, I've probably lost a lot of you out of sheer boredom. If you've managed to hang on this far, I have one more tip to share. If you've got a lot of files to bust, you might have a hard time remembering the names to type in when you're prompted to do so. Yeah, they show up on the screen, but so do all the .out and.don files and you have to really look for the ones you haven't busted among all that mess. To simplify this, RIGHT click on your Buster shortcut and go to Properties, select the Program tab, and in the Cmd line add <space>/LIST (don't write the word spacein, just hit the space bar). It will look like this: D:\BUSTER\MC_BUSTR.EXE/LIST What this does is list all the .txt files you have to bust and you hit Y or N to let Buster know if you want to bust them. Follow the prompts. Be awarethat it also lists the other files in the directory, such as the .exe, so payattention to what file you're being asked to bust. I accidently tried to bustthe .exe file. Didn't work. Ok, kids, class dismissed!
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