RAYBRO%HOLON@UTRCGW.UTC.COM ("William R Brohinsky", ay) (06/13/91)
jax, what a cop out! It's only a matter of re- metacompiling F83 with the sources where you want them for view to work right! The problem in question (which I replied to directly, but here's an echo of sorts for the nets) is that f83 was written to use FCBs: file control blocks. From something like dos2.1 on, there is another mechanism called file handles. Apparently, filehandles took over from FCB's as the file-handling methodology of choice, because the line FILES=XX in the config.sys file (you DO have a config.sys file, don't you all?) sets the number of file handles you can have active at one time. FCBs are handled a bit differently: you must have a line in your config.sys that says: FCBS = x,y where x is the total number of FCBs that can be open at one time, and y is the number protected from automatic closure. If you go with the default, none are protected, and you have a limit of about four (it may be five). The problem reported was an error message ``FCB unavailable'' (or some such DOS-wash.) This is given when you open more files than you have FCBs. The system assumes that you really want to open the next file, so it automatically closes the first unprotected FCB to make it available. If you have ten FCBs available, with five of them protected from automatic closure, and open eleven files, the sixth FCB will be closed and re-opened for the new file. Then, if you try to re-access the sixth file, you will get the error message, ``FCB unavailable''. The solution is just to figure out how many FCB's you'll need (ie, how many files will be opened) and set FCBS = that number. raybro