Release Notes

Version 1.0b7

tcpcmd and NetEvents

tcpcmd now works with either NetEvents or tcpcmd's built-in UCMD.

As shipped, tcpcmd is set to work with NetEvents. If you have had success with tcpcmd's UCMD in the past, you may want to continue to use it instead of NetEvents. Change the entry at tcpcmd.useUCMD to 'TRUE' to use the UCMD instead of NetEvents.

Note: The built-in UCMD will be temporarily used for the RFC time routines, even if you're using NetEvents. These functions will be provided for in a later release of NetEvents.

Improvements and bug fixes have been made in many areas of tcpcmd. The most significant changes, fixes, and improvements are shown below. For more detailed information, please refer to the changeNotes.

General Improvements in Operation

Several improvements in the way tcpcmd operates on various cpus and networking environments have been made. Generally, those notes pertaining to stability are referring to the built-in UCMD in tcpcmd.

  • NetEvents support provides improved stability.
  • tcpcmd cooperates better with Frontier and other applications.
  • Version 1.0b7 is not PPC-native or OT-native but it is compatible with any combination of 68K or PPC CPU and MacTCP or Open Transport.
  • Frontier can run as a client and server on the same Mac - either 68K or PPC.
  • New low-level verbs and additional parameters permit more protocols to be supported.

HTTP Authentication

Now you can check and retrieve http documents in protected realms. Two new verbs, tcpcmd.checkProtectedURL and tcpcmd.getProtectedURL have been added. You can pass username and password parameters along with the URL. A new verb, tcpcmd.base64encode, is used to encode the username and password parameters in the http request to the host.

Buffered File I/O

All tcpcmd verbs that read or write from disk are now buffered. A new optional parameter bufSize lets you specify how much memory is used for transfers. The default is 5120 bytes. Frontier will use twice the bufSize amount since this version relies on some string verbs.

Binary File Support

tcpcmd is now much smarter about different file types. If you use Internet Config (recommended), tcpcmd will use its file mapping settings to determine the file type, creator and file transfer methods. If you don't use IC, a simple algorithm handles the most common file types, defaulting to binary for those it doesn't know.

The optional transferAs parameter in many of these verbs now defaults to nil. If you have scripts that specify the transferAs parameter, they will still function as before.

FTP Client

In addition to numerous bug fixes, FTP improvements include:

  • Large file transfers are now possible with tcpcmd. See the comments above about buffered file i/o.
  • ASCII and Binary file transfers are now supported. See the comments above about binary file support.
  • Optional ISO-8859-1 translation
  • When uploading to FTP hosts, missing directories specified in the destination path are now created (tcpcmd.ftp.sureFilePath).

checkURL

checkURL now returns all conditions as strings. No scriptErrors are used. This should make link-checking scripts a bit easier to write. All successful checks return a string with the prefix "Success: " or "Redirected: " and all error conditions return a string with a prefix of "Error:".

getURL

getURL now uses the new file transfer capabilities described above when saving http and ftp urls to disk.

HTTP Client

HTTP requests can now include any HTTP header fields desired. This makes it possible to use Last-Modified and other commonly used fields to refine the request.

SMTP Client

sendMail now supports lists and tables as recipient lists to aid bulk mailing applications. A new optional parameter, mimeType, lets you specify the mime type of the message text. The default is "text/plain", which ensures compatability with previous versions.

POP Client

Minor bug fixes were made.

Servers

Both the finger and http servers have been overhauled. Listen scripts run in their own thread and no longer spawn copies of themselves. Listen scripts no longer use semaphores. This has increased the speed of the servers. New stopServer scripts are better at closing connections and killing listen script threads.

The http server supports Mason Hale's CGI Framework.

This page was last built on 8/1/98; 10:28:44 PM ET by Alan German, asg@erols.com. At the moment, I am using Macintosh OS to work on this website. The "Electric Cactus" graphic is based on original artwork owned by UserLand Software and is used with their permission.