First Few Plus: File Identification Utility
by Oliver Schn and Peter Bond

This application, originally published in RISC User 5:7, has been updated. Please see the end of this help file for details of the improvements.

FirstFew is a short RISC OS compliant application that allows you to have a look at the first 217 bytes of any file dragged to it. This can be very handy, for example, when trying to sort out the latest versions of various programs or modules, as the version identification is usually given in the first couple of lines of code. Thus, to check which version of CLib you have, just drag the CLib module to the FirstFew icon, and a window will pop up displaying the version number (amongst other readable and unreadable information).

Running the application will install an icon on the right-hand side of the icon bar. Dragging any file out of a directory viewer to this icon will open a window displaying the first 217 bytes of the file as ASCII text (unprintable characters are displayed as full stops). Dragging a directory results in an error box being displayed.

The application, which was originally published in RISC User 5:7, has been updated to improve its usefulness with Impression documents. If an Impression document is dragged to the icon bar icon, then FirstFew will look inside the document directory for a directory called Chapter1, and will display the first few bytes from the file called Text in that directory. This means the first few characters of Impression documents can easily be seen.

 RISC User 1992
