Workbench At Work
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AmigaDOS has few restrictions on what you can name a file; Filenames can be up to 31 characters long and contain numerals, letters, and special characters such as "%" and "*". If you plan to use the Shell to augment or replace the Workbench interface, however, you should be careful to avoid filenames that contain spaces/Although such names are permitted under AmigaDOS and the Shell, they are harder to work with than names without spaces.
You don't have to worry about giving two files the same name. As long as the files are not in the same window, they can have the same name. Workbench can keep them apart because it uses a file's complete pathname, not just its filename, to identify a file. The pathname consists of the filename and all the names of the drawers and disks above it in the hierarchy. Thus, files with the same name in different drawers will have different pathnames.
Information: One of the more complicated items on the Workbench, Infor mation is also one of the most important. The name is self-explanatory: Infor mation gives you information about icons. The type of information depends upon the type of icon you are accessing.
Disk: Consider Figure 3-12. This is the information window for the System2.0 volume that came as part of my Amiga 3000 system. The window displays a lot of useful data about the volume. At the top-center of the In formation window, you find the name of the icon and its type; in this case, System2.0 is a volume, which is what Workbench calls disks. Below the name is a picture of the icon. To the left of the icon image are four numbers labeled Blocks, Used, Free, and Block size. The last of these tells you that each block on the disk contains 512 bytes of storage. This is standard for all Amiga disks, hard and floppy. (A block is a physical division on a disk. Be cause you access disks using filenames, you don't need to know much more about blocks than that each holds one half kilobyte of data.) The Block number reports the total size of the disk, while Used and Free state the number of blocks currently used to store files and the number available to store files, respectively. Used and Free always add up to the number in Block. To the right of the icon image is the read-write status of the volume. A volume can be either read-write, allowing you to load files from and save files to the disk, or read-only, letting you only load from the disk. You can change the read-write status of a floppy disk by moving the read-write (write-protect) tab on the disk.
Below the image is the date and time the volume was formatted. This infor mation is only as accurate as your Amiga's internal clock was when you created the volume. Below this is a text gadget that lists the icon's default tool. In the case of a volume icon, this is the DiskCopy tool in the System