Re: Help! Filetype $00 problems . . .

[Randy Shackelford <shack@onyx.southwind.net>]

Jeff Blakeney <CUTjefbla@bconnex.net> wrote:

:>Right, it uses four bits for the length and the other four for the storage
:>type. Still for all intents and purposes it's a Pascal string.

: Well, you still need to be careful.  If you think about it as a Pascal
: string then you might put the wrong value in that location sometime.
: For example, if you were to be playing with the PRODOS file and you
: changed the byte preceding the filename to $06 (length of filename is
: 6 characters) you'd end up telling ProDOS that you have deleted the
: file (storage type of 0) but those blocks would still be marked as
: used in the volume bit map.

Only an issue if you're doing block level access to a directory, and if
you're doing that you probably know what's up.

: I just booted a ProDOS Users Disk with ProDOS v1.0.1 on it and
: BASIC.SYSTEM gives me an I/O ERROR and the Filer program gives me an
: ERROR CODE = 4A if I try to rename or delete an extended file.  It
: appears the code to disallow renaming and deleting of extended files
: has been around since day one.

It seems like more recent versions of BASIC return a FILE TYPE MISMATCH
in response to the UNSUPPORTED STORAGE_TYPE from the kernel. I could
not be remembering right though.

: True, I should have made the distinction that standard program
: including BASIC.SYSTEM don't have any special way of noting an
: extended file when listing files in a directory.

: However, most users only have access to the standard stuff which
: doesn't show extended files in any special way so making the
: distinction could be confusing to some readers.  You are right that
: they can be updated to show it, though.  I wouldn't mind seeing this
: at some point myself for the times I am in ProDOS 8.

Yep it's totally up to SYS programs that want to do catalogs to implement
'em. That's cool since you can make the listing look however you want.
I like how ORCA gives you DNBWR in listings instead of either locked or 
unlocked for instance, so all the code I've written does that.

:>I wrote ECP8 shell programs to do plenty of stuff like that. One useful such
:>program was one which reads the data fork of an extended file and writes
:>the data to a standard file. I was working on a program to delete extended
:>files but never got the kinks out of it. Man I haven't touched any of that
:>stuff in many moons.

: Cool.  Did any of your ECP8 stuff ever get released or is it like a
: lot of my code? (hacked together so that it works but it isn't pretty
: :-)

Don Elton didn't want derivative stuff using the source from ECP8 distributed
so I've never put it anywhere myself. I sent him my homemade ECP8 SYS program
and some shell programs and he made 'em accessible so if you can find his
stuff online (I forget where it is) you can get it.
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