/// ///PreScan v.04á (c) 2/94 WayForward Technologies, inc. /// --Background Widely regarded as *the* best dialer on the market, ToneLoc has rapidly become the scanning utility of choice among pro and amateur alike... Of course, like all exchange scanning programs, its only drawback is the amount of time it actually takes to scan an exchange. Given 30 seconds a scan, it will take approximately 300,000 seconds (that's roughly 3.5 DAYS) to scan a single exchange. You're probably thinking, "But I scan 'intelligently', just a few hours a day, and only in ranges I know will pay off." But think about it: Even if you were to cut the numbers by 1/3, you would still have over 24 hours of scan time PER EXCHANGE, during which time you are vulnerable to detection. And, by skipping over "residential" areas of the exchange, you potentially miss some (usually VERY interesting) opportunities for carriers, VMB's, the occasional PBX, etc. Naturally, we need a way to try to eliminate the 97.4% of all residential numbers in a given exchange without actually dialing them. We think we can help... Using PreScan can potentially cut your scan time by up to 85%. PreScan takes a text file list of phone numbers that you DON'T want to dial (such as the ENTIRE white page listing for the prefix you are scanning) and insert that data into a ToneLoc data file. Now you may ask "How the hell do I get the white pages into a text file without typing the whole damn thing in?" Well, we thought of two ways: 1. Use a good optical scanner and Optical Character Recognition software (available publicly) and then scan in pages of the white pages, convert to text, and then run PreScan. or 2. Do what we did, and get the CD-ROM for the white pages and there you have it at your finger tips. To use PreScan, you need an ascii datafile of four digit numbers. They should be padded with 0's to four digits each, and there should not be any non-numeric characters in the file. There can be as many four digit phone numbers on a line as you like. For example: 0003 4623 0593 0746 9164 0010 9766 1254 4912 5063 3145 6890 0042 4632 4067 0947 2525 0194 0142 4915 0486 0643 5762 8125 9914 6864 ...would be a valid (albeit short) datafile. ** NOTE TO v.03 USERS: You no longer need to sort the numbers, nor do they need to be kept one on a line... PreScan will figure out just about any kind of spacing between numbers, and will sort the list internally. These numbers should be in the same exchange, the exchange of the datafile you want to put them into. (duh) Just type: C:\TL> prescan numbers.txt voice to flag all the numbers contained in "numbers.txt" to voice. This will effectively add all the numbers in your text file to a file called PRESCAN.DAT as if you had already scanned them. Later you can combine this file with the already existing ToneLoc datafile of that prefix or if you haven't started on that prefix, you can simply rename it to something like: 555-XXXX.DAT. NOTE! UNLESS YOU WANT TO COMPLETELY OVERWRITE "PRESCAN.DAT" YOU *MUST* USE THE /a SWITCH ON THE COMMAND LINE. THIS WILL NOT BE A PROBLEM IF YOU USE COMBINE OR RENAME "PRESCAN.DAT" TO SOMETHING ELSE. C:\TL> prescan numbers2.txt blacklisted /a The above example with the /a command line parameter will add the numbers in "numbers2.txt" to the already existing data file called PRESCAN.DAT. They will be stored as being "blacklisted." If you have questions, comments, ideas, etc., you can reach us at: apd@velcro.cis.temple.edu elvis@velcro.cis.temple.edu Velcro is now an anonymous FTP site, so the current version (currently v.04á) of the software will always be there. ....... ....... Coding: Arthur P. Dent . . . . . . . . . Additional Ideas: Elvis Presley . . . . . . . . . ...... ...... ayForward Technologies, inc. //