Author: Ricardo Gibert
Date: 20:20:54 04/06/00
Go up one level in this thread
On April 06, 2000 at 22:25:06, Tom Kerrigan wrote: >On April 06, 2000 at 21:14:51, Ricardo Gibert wrote: > >>On April 06, 2000 at 17:32:20, Tom Kerrigan wrote: >> >>>I moved the file to a new directory, booted to DOS, and did a deltree. That >>>fixed it. >>> >>>I have no idea why nothing else worked (I must have tried a dozen things) but >>>the problem's solved, so never mind. >>> >>>Thanks for the input. >>> >>>-Tom >> >>I think the title to your original post "lenoid's chess program screwed my hard >>drive--suggestions?" is quite rude to Leonid. Clearly, it did not "screw" your >>hard drive. > >Perhaps my hard drive was not sparking and smoking, but the file that Lenoid's >program wrote was causing my file system to behave in a completely unacceptable >fashion. > >>It also did not help matters to mis-describe the problem. You state "...which I >>can not open, _move_, rename...". Then you solve the problem by doing precisely >>what you said you could not. You _move_ the file, etc. > >What I said was partially correct. When I tried to move the file under DOS, it >would just give me an error message. Later I found out that I could move the >file under Windows. I posted to this effect several times, later in this thread, >and I'm sorry for the confusion. > >>My guess is Leonid's editor introduced some strange, "non-visible" character >>into the file name. I think it would be helpful if you do what can to determine >>definitively the cause of the problem and apologize to Leonid for what was >>clearly an gross exaggeration. Leonid is problably one of the most inoffensive, >>patient & polite posters around here. > >I just got some e-mail from Lenoid saying that his program puts ASCII 255's at >the end of the file name. I assume this behavior is intentional. I think it's >completely unacceptable for several reasons: > >1) It keeps Windows from opening, deleting, or renaming the file. Lenoid knew >about this and didn't do anything about it. > >2) It takes special effort to type in ASCII 255's under DOS. I don't see why >anybody would want to do this. Plus, how is somebody supposed to know that the >filename ends in ASCII 255's? Or try the * or ? wildcards, e.g. My first tries would be DEL *NAME.* and DEL NAME*.* which probably would have taken care of your problem. > >3) Lenoid's program prompts you for a filename. If I type in "asdf", then it >should save the file in asdf, not asdf with some flakey extension. I even read >the readme file and it didn't say anything about this stuff. > >In short, I feel justified in being upset about such behavior. You mentioned a lot of reasons justifying the title _after_ learning more. Don't you think you were jumping to conclusions? A title like "Problem with Leonid's program: Unable to delete save file". This would have gotten your message across without pre-judgment and the inflamatory and disrespectful term "screwed". After all, he did not mean to cause you problems deliberately. Of course he owes you an apology for the problems it caused and I'm sure he gave you one. He's a gentleman. But I think you in turn owe him an apology for the term "screwed". After all, the "problem" was quite trivial. I have encountered the same "problem" myself (dating way back to my apple II+ days) and solved the "problem" by myself without drama. The technique he used is well known to DOS "gurus" to protect a file from being tampered with. As you can atest, it is not always a good idea. > >-Tom
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