Just a short note to explain the workings of 3PLIB.EXE to anyone interested in
playing with CauseWay DLL's.

CauseWay's DLL loader now has the ability to find modules (a DLL) within a
larger combination of modules. As an example, if you have one DLL that deals
with file I/O called FILEIO and another that deals with memory allocation called
MEMORY, you could do: copy /b fileio.dll + memory.dll system.dll . Now the file
system.dll contains both FILEIO & MEMORY and CauseWays DLL loader will still be
able to find both of them. They are still independant of each other, ie, if
only FILEIO is imported in a program then only the FILEIO module will be load'd
into memory.

All that's happening here is that when the DLL module finder opens a file and
finds a CauseWay 3P header, if the module name it finds isn't the one it's after
it moves past the 3P section of the file and starts again. If the next part of
the file is a CauseWay 3P header it'll look in that and do the same thing again
until it finds the module it wants. This process also extends to skipping the
stub loader used in CauseWay programs so a stand alone EXE can also have
additional modules appended to it.

3PLIB simply automates the copy /b process and generaly makes life simpler when
trying to deal with multiple module files. You can add a module, update an
existing one, delete a module, extract (copy) a module, list all module
names and exported symbols, and generate an import object to build an import
library. What you effectively wind up with is a library of DLL modules which
are much more dynamic in use than a standard DLL and neater than lots of small
DLL files.

Remember that all you're dealing with here is a bunch of CauseWay files appended
to create one big file.


If you run 3PLIB without any comands you'll see something like this:

ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ
3PLib v1.00 Copyright 1995 John Wildsmith; All rights reserved.
ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ

Usage:

3plib commands lib_name mod_name [out_name]

commands:

 A - add/replace module in library.
 D - delete module in library.
 E - extract module from library.
 I - write Import object file.
 L - list modules in library.

lib_name  name of library to process.
mod_name  name of module to process.
out_name  name of extracted module file.

commands should be prefixed with /, - or +


That should be pretty self explanatory but I'll go through an example of each
command just to make sure.


To add or update a module,

3PLIB /a system.dll fileio.dll

If system.dll doesn't already exist it will be created. If it has a stub loader
or any trailing data of a none CauseWay nature, that will all be left intact.
If the module name of the file fileio.dll is already in system.dll the existing
module will be replaced with the new module. If the module doesn't already
exist it will be inserted after the last module in the file, before any none 3P
trailing data, after any stub loader.


To delete a module,

3PLIB /d system.dll memory

system.dll will be searched for a module with a name of "memory". When that
module is found it will be removed from system.dll. It's important to note that
"memory" is the real name of the module, NOT it's origional file name. It's
file name got lost when it was put in the library. Module names are NOT
restricted to 8.3 characters. If you didn't use a NAME command in the DEF file
when the module was linked then the modules name will be the origional file
name without an extension.


To extract a module,

3PLIB /e system.dll fileio fileio.dll

This is more copy than extract as the module is NOT deleted from system.dll but
calling it extract is more consistent with file archivers and more likely to be
remembered. system.dll will be searched for a module with a name of "fileio".
When that module is found it will be copied to fileio.dll. If the output file
name isn't specified the file name will be made up of the first 8 characters of
the module name with .dll appended. "fileio.dll" is optional. Again it's
important to note that "fileio" is the real name of the module, not it's
origional file name.


3PLIB /i fileio.dll fileio.obj

This creates an object module "fileio.obj" and puts EXTDEF & IMPDEF records in
it for every exported symbol in fileio.dll. You can then use a standard LIB
manager to put the OBJ in a LIB file to create an import library for your DLL's.
Note that if the file "fileio.dll" actually contains multiple modules the
output OBJ file will have entries for ALL exported symbols in the DLL, not just
the first module or anything like that. You should really only ever use this
option on DLL's containing a single module.


To list module details,

3PLIB /l system.dll

This lists all module names and all the symbols exported in each module. The
output for each module is seperated by a blank line, module names start in
column one, export names in column 4.


Commands can appear anywhere on the command line, they don't _have_ to be at
the start.


Have fun!
