June 13, 1996

This directory contains shell scripts that provide a nondestructive
file deletion system.  That is you can "delete" files, which sends
them to a convenient out of the way place.  Later you can "undelete"
such files if you realize you have made a mistake, or you can "purge"
such files to really make them go away (via "rm").  Some variations on
these ideas are also provided.

There are actually 6 commands provided here with essentially two
different files.  That is the directory entries "del", "keep1",
"cleanup", "lsd", "undel", and "purge", are just links to the file
"versctrl", and you also need the script "mvnc" that is called by some
of the other commands.  (If you copy the files in a naive fashion,
you'll probably get 7 copies of the file "versctrl" rather than one
copy and 6 links.  Everything will still work fine, but you can save
storage by setting up links.)  The 6 basic commands are heavily
documented by comments at the beginning of the "versctrl" file.  (I've
called this directory and the base file "versctrl" for "version
control", because one of the things you can do is to delete all old
versions of a file as created by the emacs version control system, for
example.)

This directory also contains two other files that you probably don't
need.  The file "CHANGELOG.txt" gives a record of changes to the
system mostly as it was being developed way back in 1988.  The file
"cpifnewer" copies $1 to $2 if it is newer than $2 or $2 is nonexistent.
Perhaps you'll find that useful for something, but it's not part of the
system described in "versctrl".