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Clean Up AppleWorks temporary files
Authored by: haumann on Jan 28, '04 06:13:42PM

It's not the equation editor that's causing the proliferation of files in the recent items folder -- AppleWorks itself is the culprit. You'd get the same proliferation if you never used the equation editor at all. This bug has been around since the introduction of AW6. Despite preference settings to the contrary, AW creates a new entry in recent items every time you open an AW document -- apparently, the code to remove items that are no longer considered recent was not implemented.

Having said al that, your fix is a good one, but it applies to pretty much all AW6 users, not just those who use its equation editor.



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Clean Up AppleWorks temporary files
Authored by: peterneillewis on Jan 28, '04 09:27:20PM
Yes, this has annoyed me too. But this hint inspired me to solve the problem. Save the following script, adjust the $maxrecent variable to somewhat less than your AppleWorks preference setting for number of recent files to remember, and then run the script from cron (crontab -e) using this line (adjusting the path to the script).

22 1 * * * perl '/Users/peter/perl/CleanAppleWorksRecent.pl'
then once per day the script will run and delete any old recent files and life will be much improved. Note that the script is quite pedantic about the listing romat to ensure it does not delete things it should not delete (so it ensures that the file size is zero for example).

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use warnings;
use strict;
use diagnostics;

my $maxrecent = 25;
my $appleworks_recent_dir = "$ENV{HOME}/Documents/AppleWorks User Data/Starting Points/Recent Items";

my $count = 0;
chdir( $appleworks_recent_dir ) or die "Cant change to AppleWorks Recent Directory $!";
open( LIST, "/bin/ls -lt |" ) or die;
while ( <LIST> ) {
	chomp;
	next if m!^total \d+$!;
	die $_ unless s!^-rw-r--r--  1 \w+\s+\w+\s+0 [A-Z][a-z][a-z] [0-9 ]\d \d\d:\d\d ([^/]+)$!$1!;
	my $file = $1;
	$count++;
	if ( $count >= $maxrecent ) {
#		print "rm $file\n";
		unlink( $file );
	}
}
close( LIST );


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Appleworks Slowdown
Authored by: samread on May 14, '04 04:16:02PM

I also have the problem of slowing down Appleworks 6.2.4 using OS 10.3.3 on a G4 iMac with 512 MB RAM. I have TechTool Pro and have optimised everything in sight but Appleworks still doesn't speed up.
I use it a lot but am extremely un-technical. Can anyone possibly take me by a theoretical hand and guide me through some process that will avoid me having to tear out what little remains of my hair – please??



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