For quite a few years now, AutoCAD’s Express tools have included a great command called “Overkill.” It’s found in the Express pulldown menu, under Modify/Delete duplicate objects. Or you can simply type “overkill” at the command line.
However, users have complained that it often doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do when you give it a mixture of lines and polylines. If, for example, you select both a polyline and line drawn on top of each other, overkill doesn’t work. Funny that, because I’m sure it used to work properly in earlier AutoCADs!
Anyway, after a lot of stumbling around, and bearing in mind the previous comment, I’ve discovered that overkill seems to be dependent on the PEDITACCEPT system variable. We all breathed a sigh of relief when PEDITACCEPT was introduced to AutoCAD in around version 2004. Naturally, we set it to 1 so we wouldn’t get that annoying message asking if we were sure we wanted to turn it into a polyline (doh – what do they think we were using the pedit command for, then?)
Now, it seems that setting PEDITACCEPT to 1 kills that function in the overkill command. If you set PEDITACCEPT to 0 before you run overkill, then it works. Set PEDITACCEPT back to 1 after you finish and all will be tickety-boo!
